The Manifold Mind of Saul Bellow

Summary

Saul Bellow, 1962, Photograph /Getty ImagesTwenty years ago, the year of Saul Bellow’s death, I chanced upon an unusually clean copy of Ravelstein in a ramshackle bookstall in New Delhi. India is an unexpected place to wind up reading, for the first time, this midcentury urban intellectual, comic dissector of America’s moronic inferno. But, as it happens, amidst the street chaos and the tiresome pressures of train travel and seedy hostels, I found that my irked, overstimulated soul was peculiarly receptive to the master’s comforting genius. I consumed the book in a couple of hours at a restaurant counter. I remember thinking that I would not soon forget the experience. But, hardly in my 20s at the time, I’ve wondered since what I detected in it. What did the man have to offer me, so green, so goyish? This was Bellow’s very last novel, written in his 80s. Riffing on topics of Jewishness, sickness, aging, dying, marriage, politics, history, friendship; he was a very adult sort of thinker, a mature man’s writer. Yet I was so thrilled by this that upon my return home I read all of his work, and later his essays and letters, then the multitudinous biographies, memoirs, and studies that came out in the decades following his death. Today I am that rare creature: the millennial Bellovian.The 2000s was an era with a certain showy yet wan style in literature. David Mitchell had bumbled onto the world stage with his egregious Cloud Atlas. The Big Writers with Big Initials — George R.R. Martin, J.K. Rowling — were pumping out their wearisome commercial blockbusters. David Sedaris was eking out a drearily comic thing seemingly every year. James Wood had coined the phrase “hysterical realism,” which correctly diagnosed a certain quality of prolific and anxious postmodern melodrama in then-popular novels by Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Junot Diaz and David Foster Wallace. The barely beating heart of American poetry, gluttonized upon the empty calories of flarf, was being bas...