Word: sammler
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...immediate conclusion -- that the culprit is the Haitian boyfriend of her Austrian au pair girl -- will offend liberal sensibilities, especially since it turns out to be correct. Bellow has ruffled racial feathers before, notably in Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) and The Dean's December (1982), and his new heroine's thoughts will not heal those old wounds: "These people came up from the tropical slums to outsmart New York, and with all the rules crumbling here as elsewhere, so that nobody could any longer be clear in his mind about anything, they could do it." But Clara is here...
...contemporaries. Bellow has been the most rigorous naysayer to nihilism of his era. He has never tried to hide the gloomy truths about modern life or gloss over all the sound reasons (starting or ending with Auschwitz) for a thinking person to despair. His most memorable characters (Herzog, Mr. Sammler, Henderson the Rain King) can list in sometimes comic detail all the symptoms of the decline of the West. Almost alone in serious contemporary fiction, though, Bellow's heroes think that a cure may be worth...
...richest, Saul Bellow's freestyle prose reads as if a Division Street Dostoyevsky were writing a book called Thus Spake the Nobel Savage. In Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), the author's tone took a Spenglerian edge as the novel's elderly New Yorker ruminated on the decline of the West Side and, inferentially, civilization as the author knows and reveres it. Sammler had political repercussions. Bellow was accused of being aloof, insensitive and a neoconservative. He has calmly and disdainfully rejected these labels as simplistic...