Bellow, Saul. More Die of Heartbreak. William Morrow, New York 1987. F;7/25.

I decided to read this novel after reading Martin Amis’s apotheosis of Bellow. It’s Bellow’s 10^th out of 14 or so novels and because I read The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog many years ago and remember really enjoying them I don’t by comparison think it’s one of his best. It seems to me a bit like Amis’s wandering search for transcendence that doesn’t quite make it. Birds of a feather, although I don’t think Amis ever approached Bellow’s early brilliance.

Troubled intellectual narrator Kenneth Trachtenberg admires his uncle Benn not so much because he is a world-famous botanist but because for Ken “If Benn was not yet a Citizen, if Eternity was not ready to give him his second papers, he was as close to it as I had ever been able to come.” So although we are interested in Ken as a potential autobiographic Bellow, we are pointed at Uncle Benn as representing “Eternity”. Ken still tells us “Inner communion with the great human reality was my true occupation.” So Ken too is reaching for that trancendence, but for a reason that never comes quite clear he feels he might only find it through his uncle Benn. So who is this magic uncle?

Well Benn has disappointed Ken recently by quietly marrying beautiful Matilda Layamon, daughter of a slimey rich physician “… to have you to herself for two or three months.” says her daddy. And Ken didn’t add: “To cut me out.” But anyway it’s clear that Matilda didn’t marry old uncle Benn for his being in touch with the ineffable, let alone his skill in bed, but because she thought he was socially presentable. And along those lines her dad tells Benn that he (Matilda’s dad) has a scheme to make the newlyweds rich by suing Harold (another member of Ken’s family) who has allegedly cheated Ken’s mother in a real estate deal. Sophisticated avarice intervenes so we may wonder whether Benn’s academic and spiritual life is still be meeting Ken’s spiritual standard.

In case we missed Benn’s lacklustre sexuality along the way Ken visits his ex-wife Treckie and young daughter in Seattle and reflects on her preference for a physically rough man. Both Ken and Benn it seems “(f)ailed to persuade … girls to adopt (Ken’s) sexual twelve-tone scale” as Ken’s father put it. Indeed for the red hot pants Bellow and his contemporaries usually laid claim to we get to look to Ken’s father himself who

in his heyday was a strutter. He put on the kind of sex display you see in nature films, the courting behaviour of turkey cocks or any of the leggier birds.

Ken is impressed with this but is hunting different birds and tells us “…the truth is that I am a much tougher guy than my father and play for much higher stakes.” Flying we still imagine in the incipiently cluttered stratosphere where Uncle Benn orbits.

Anyway ethereal Ken and his uncle are hauled down into the terrestrial world of marital/financial intrigue and sex where they aren’t as much at home as the good doctor, Benn’s father-in-law. He and Benn have lunch and he (without being asked) helpfully explains to Benn:

…old fools are afraid some karate instructor will sweep their old biddy away, and they start asking about prostheses. Or maybe a little air bulb so you can inflate the member. Like a blood pressure cuff, you know.”

But he justifies giving intimate paramedical advice by a little inside information and his own financial agenda. He says he has “a pretty fair idea about you (Benn) that way. Don’t be annoyed, but we ran a little check on you, purely private and absolutely discreet. You can’t blame us.” and “… if there was serious stuff in the fellow’s report, he would have gone to you and tried to sell it to you first.” But then “…(to) share the bed of this delicious girl of high breeding and wallow in it, you’ll have to find the money it takes.” (italics mine).

Ken’s poor spiritual and academic iconic uncle has sexual/financial bathos all over him probably through no fault of his own. So what happens to Ken and his search for spiritual reality? The narrative peters out.

I feel about this novel the way I felt about Michael Cunningham’s Day compared to The Hours . Saul Bellow here feels like a thrilling writer winding down. At his best he is spellbinding. And like in the late Cunningham I was dazzled by flashes of poetry and insight, but here these are delivered out of the side of the mouth:

“I wash my hands of you.” Vilitzers upper lip was curled under, like his bangs. “And what did you answer?” “Nothing. You’re the one with the ready wit—what would you have said?” “I would have sent him a box of Lady Macbeth Hand Soap…Vilitzer would never have heard of Lady Macbeth.”

We don’t need to go into this here, explaining why Uncle Benn was not ashamed to do the dishes.

(I did enjoy Bellows’s narrator as benign culture and aesthetic tour guide who decides what is necessary and what isn’t while he circles and gestures toward but never quite reaches things that really matter without naming them)

… it then occurs to (people having difficulties and looking at Nature), “It’s my mind that perceives this order, beauty, et cetera. It may even be my mind that created it. It’s possible that Nature doesn’t even exist. I made it up, just to fill up space. Well, if I’m gifted with such a mind, why am I lying here with a quaking heart, like a baby porcupine being ragged by dogs?”

(… a quick dip into metaphysical idealism)

I don’t want to claim editorial authority when I don’t like writing that’s way over my head. But here I’m pretty sure others would agree that Saul Bellow gives us bits and pieces instead of real coherence and uses a less graceful and powerful voice than we got in his earlier work.

There is better Bellow elsewhere. 7.4/7.9