The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 21 April 2011
by Saul Bellow
Moses Herzog is a man in existential crisis. His life has come apart after the end of his second marriage and now he wants to convey to the people in his life, living and dead, what life is like for him, what he thinks it means, and how it contradicts their experiences or thoughts. Moses is adrift in New York, thinking hard about his life. He writes to acquaintances, colleagues, relatives and even the intellectuals who inspired and guided him in his work. He is a university researcher and writer, on the tail end of a sabbatical on which he tried to follow up a brilliant early book by another, writing in seclusion in the Massachusetts Berkshires. There, his beautiful wife, far from the stimulation of city life, took up an affair with a neighboring friend. Herzog is bitter about this, but also resigned to the shifts and changes that love and life bring to him. It is unclear how much of this he brought upon himself by his own cool intellectual distance. He looks a little unhinged in his letters, going on long rants about life and philosophy with many references to historical thinkers. As a result, the book can be a bit of a slog. Some of these highly philosophical cogitations take some concentration to untangle.
But there are rewards here. What starts out as potentially bleak has moments of surprising grace and even joy. Herzog isn't hating life so much as he is merely disappointed by it. His personal wanderings reflect the wanderings of his mind. He accepts an invitation out to Martha's Vineyard, only to turn around for home that same night. He visits his friends and one particularly adept lover, all of whom have ideas about what Herzog should do next. Most of them advise merely moving on, abandoning his grim thoughts about his lost second wife. But Moses also loves his children, one by each of his two wives. He makes a clumsy attempt to connect with his daughter back in Chicago. His efforts and petty failures cause the people around him to see him as coming unhinged. To the reader, even, his mental state is somewhat unclear. He is simply struggling with his life, middle aged, twice divorced, intellectually stuck, financially shaky, professionally stunted, in desperate love with thinking and with the beauty that he can find in the world. Herzog can be surprisingly gentle and generous, but here, at least, takes from his friends what advice and support they can give. The book is at least partially autobiographical. It is an intense journey through this man's crisis, often dark, existential, philosophical, but also often witty and sharp. It is a quirky book, with the same kind of masculine despair one finds in John Updike, but with more weight and intellectual verve.
(For this book, Bellow was awarded the 1965 National Book Award for fiction.)
(Bellow went on to be awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature.)