Herzog

Rating:
Summary: dull
Review: This book only affirmed to me what Truman Capote said about Saul Bellow, "Saul Bellow is a dull writer, and a dull man." This is certainly a dull book.

Rating:
Summary: Moses Herzog is the quintessential protean man.
Review: This is a great book--watch those changes from first to third person within the same paragraph! Check out Robert J. Lifton's "Protean Self" for a complete analysis of how Moses Herzog is the quintessential protean man. (Proteus was the Greek god who could change form to suit his circumstances.)

Rating:
Summary: one of the best novels of the 20th c.
Review: This is just one of the most wonderful books I know. I've read it a dozen times, and it just gets better. It's smart AND wise, both, and it drags you right into Herzog's mind in the way a truly good book should pull you into its central character...

Rating:
Summary: A challenging read
Review: This novel would certainly not qualify as a light read. It requires a quiet setting, no distractions, and your close attention. As is often the case with what I would call "intellectual fiction", the plot is not all that complicated. Moses Herzog, twice divorced, is coming to grips with the dissolution of his second marriage, wherein his wife has taken up with his best friend.

What is complicated is Saul Bellow's trip deep into the psyche of his protagonist. Herzog is on the edge of a mental breakdown, and as one way of working through things he write notes and letters to colleagues, friends, celebrities, etc. Sometimes the notes are written out, and sometimes just done mentally; there is no intent to send them. These notes and letters (although admittedly central to the story and to Herzog's character) also serve as a showcase for Bellow's own intellectual acuity, a notion I could never quite put aside. The notion that Bellow was, to put it plainly, "showing off". All and all, though, this really is a challenging read and one that will give you a good idea of Bellow's style.

Rating:
Summary: Saul Bellow's "Herzog"
Review: This was the first novel by Saul Bellow I’ve read. Overall, I thought he had a wonderful writing style, particularly in the smaller details. The descriptions of urban landscapes, facial features, and short sketches of minor characters reminded me of the best stylists from nineteenth and early twentieth century French literature.

The main action of the novel takes place over a period of about five days, as the main character, Professor Moses Herzog, travels back and forth from New York City, Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, and the Berkshires ruminating over the collapse of his marriage to his second wife. As he moves through space, Herzog travels in time as well. He reviews his personal past and examines his scholarly pursuits. The descriptions of the narrator’s early childhood in Quebec were my favorite segments. I understand that Bellow spent his early childhood near Montreal, and I assume the affectionate portraits of relatives and neighbors may be based to some degree on his own experiences growing up there.

While the minor characters sparkle, the same cannot always be said for the major ones. The middle third of the novel drags on with its descriptions of Herzog’s relationships with two New York women, Ramona and Sono. Both women appear to have no purpose in life other than to serve gourmet meals to Herzog and orchestrate elaborate seduction scenes. These characters go nowhere. At a certain point in your reading you realize exactly where you are – you have been sent backward in time and dropped off in the midst of the ...fantasies of a middle-aged American man of the early nineteen sixties. This is the era of James Bond, JFK, and the dawn of easy availability of the pill. Reading this novel today, you can’t miss the stale aroma of anachronism that pervades these scenes.

Then there is the philosophical meandering. Herzog constantly reels of “letters” with dense philosophical content– whether these are letters committed to paper or imaginary ones that exist only in Herzog’s mind is not always clear. In his correspondence Herzog argues over subjects such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard with an assortment of famous and not so famous addressees, ranging from Adlai Stevenson to Herr Nietzsche himself. The point of these digressions is never clear. I could not find in them a unifying philosophical standard that reflected the action of the novel. Nor does Herzog ever appear to be motivated by some distinct philosophical value. From what I could gather, this is not a novel about a man who derives some hard-earned knowledge after testing his ideas against the world. I received no insight into the novel or the world of ideas from Herzogs ruminations on the history of European philosophy. I read on the dust jacket – that Bellow is a “humanist.” If the point of all this dense text is to say that a humanist intellectual can have a tough time when he encounters evil in the world, then Bellow could have done us a favor by expressing this more succinctly.

Then there is the problem presented by the personification that “evil” takes in this novel. Tolstoy said that all happy marriages are the same, while all unhappy marriages are different. One might add that all nasty divorces are the same, too. Here we have a narrator who is intent on giving us the blow- by-blow of all his ex –spouse’s villainies. It is all there and you have heard it all before – the name-calling, the demonizing, the accusations of child abuse, the anger at confidences betrayed. Maybe this sounded fresh in 1964 when there were fewer divorces; I don’t know. Thirty-five years later, if we haven’t acted out this role ourselves, we at least have had a close friend who has. And we listened and listened, politely agreeing as the accusations droned on and on. Often as we listened, we could imagine the other ex-spouse spewing out similar venom directed against our speaker. Credibility wears thin in these monologues, and after a while this is definitely true for this novel.

Generally, I appreciated the care that marks this novel’s style and structure. The post-divorce whining and the philosophical digressions tried the patience at times, but l I thought the book gave me a good introduction this wonderful author. I will definitely read another one of his novels in the near future.

Rating:
Summary: Amazingly meticulous dissection of real life
Review: This wasn't what I'd call a lot of fun to read. But it was worth it!

I am in awe of Bellow's ability to gather together the tiny impressions, thoughts, and actions that compose our lives and relationships and build them into something resembling a plot. His main character wants the reader to know everything about how he feels, and he succeeds in getting it across. In the end, I felt like I knew Moses Herzog and wanted to have him over for drinks, just to enjoy his eccentric company.

A terrific book of masterful craftsmanship.

Rating:
Summary: Bellow is unreadable
Review: Try as I might, I could not find anything gripping or compelling about this book. Bellow might be a genius, but he's also a bore. Overrated.