Bellow: A Biography
Brent and Tony,
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StumbleUponDoes Bellow's "noticing," his penchant for exhaustive thumbnail sketches of people's and places' quiddities and oddities, ever strike you as willed and preening, even a kind of aggression? A way of saying not, "look at that," but "watch me write"? Perhaps there is love, as Tony says, in Bellow's exhaustive catalogs of (for example) scalps and skin and slippers but "self-forgetting"? Not for a moment! Chekhov, Maupassant, Stendhal, Flaubert--you never hear the note of self-congratulation in them that sounds through Bellow's strenuous exaltations. I thought Seize the Day was wonderful in the way it captured the fear and desperation of Tommy Wilhelm, the terrible need of this middle-aged failure for the approval of his cold and self-absorbed father, but beginning with Augie March, and especially Herzog and Henderson, I never feel, "There it is: the real thing, life." I feel, "There it is: literary ambition, and there he is, a brilliant man with a huge vocabulary, working like a stevedore."
Katha
This week, Brent Staples and A.O. Scott take on Bellow: A Biography, by James Atlas. Click here for a word on our format and here to buy the book. 
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Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Alan Kornheiser loved this Book Club so much that he would have paid for it. Dan Matern liked it too and was particularly interested in the race issue. David Anderson says Bellow is "small-minded and a resolutely impenetrable bore of a writer". Marianne F. Sanders used to see Bellow in the park in Chicago, and says he's a great guy.]
I'm okay with the notion of literary cannibalism and drinking blood. But what's this talk about Saul Bellow being great? That Bellow has a Nobel and Doris Lessing doesn't is now the literary crime of two millennia
--Eliot Cohen
(To reply, click here.)
If you think about it, all stories are the same. To be any good, they have to be about people (or animals with substantial human qualities) who do things other people do (or can relate to). The same story has been told a million times all over the world. The point is how you tell it. Who was it that said "All histories are fictions except the names. All novels are histories except the names"? Saul Bellow is a talented writer. He can bring a person and an event alive with vivid imageries like few others could. Shakespeare is a master at retelling other's tales. Does that diminish his status as the ultimate Bard? Fortunately, most readers know a good thing when they see it.
--Tolerance
(To reply, click here.)