a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Wednesday, April 06, 2005 Bellow's DeathOne decent thing some reporters have done in the wake of Saul Bellow's death is interview Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth, who both have the right idea. Roth keeps repeating that "the backbone of 20th-century American fiction" consisted of Bellow and Faulkner. That's true because they gave us two extremes: the teeming immigrant cities and the rotting countryside. But the rest of the journalism I've read on Bellow has been featherweight, riding on the anemic James Atlas biography. Bellow was a genius because of his deep, almost sexual feeling for everyday life, and because of the ferocious joy that fueled his greatest books. (He once trashed fashionable postwar nihilism as "canned sauerkraut.") Everything else -- including his controversial and sometimes conservative politics -- came from that fundamental fuel, and when he lost it, which he did in Ravelstein (really his worst book, not because of its ideas, or because of the characters modeled on Paul Wolfowitz and Allan Bloom; the problem with Ravelstein is the droning geriatric self-consciousness), he was a bore. But listen to this paragraph from The Adventures of Augie March:It takes some of us a long time to find out what the price is of being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve. But when at last they do dissolve there's a different taste in your mouth, bringing different news which registers with dark astonishment and fills your eyes. And this different news is that from vast existence in some way you rise up and at any moment you may go back. Any moment; the very next, maybe.posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:55 PM | |
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