No.

You like him, right?

One exception...The Adventures of Augie March supposedly sold well.

The very idea that Saul Bellow might be a spiritual parasite is most interesting.

And most telling.

(As for me, I'm all for creative misprision; but should the misprision proves embarrasing---or insulting---is it really the author who is insulted?)

Bellow wrote primarily about second generation immigrants. Transitional characters ... dangling characters, if you will. He was not, of course, the first American novelist to have done this, but he was a master of his craft.

As a vocal supporter of immigration, oj, you can't be as tone-deaf on this issue as you posture on this blog. You know perfectly well that second generation immigrants have one foot (their roots and parent-figures) in the old culture and the other foot (their social realities and aspirations) in the new culture. I'll be damned if this precarious situation doesn't often lead to internal conflicts, including mixed feelings about the parent-figures. And, yes, let's stipulate that adult conceptions of god are highly derivative of childhood perceptions of authority-figures, most importantly parent-figures.

Given that we are a nation of immigrants, this transition story is inescapably part of the Great American Narrative. In this new century, we will see this narrative spun by some fine Asian-American, Hispanic-American, and American Indian writers. Surely you anticipate this, eh?

He was Canadian.

Matt:

It was a Book of the Month Club selection when that meant something.

I must have read books by some other Saul Bellow.

Just because intellectuals like something doesn't make it bad.

And just because something is popular doesn't make it good.

Jim:

Half right.

No, in very very rare instances intellectuals like something of value.

I'll add that I think you exaggerate the extant to which said intellectuals thought Bellow a great writer. Fawning obits -- and Martin Amis -- aside, many of the literati in particular disliked him.

(Did I mention that Ravelstein is a great novel?)

Jim:

Name one thing.

"He was Canadian."

Literally true, but basically silly. Bellow's parents were first generation Russian-Jewish immigrants who moved in 1913 to Canada, where Bellow was born in 1915. The family moved to Chicago in 1924. Second generation syndrome plus.

First

I read Ravelstein. It was the only Bellow book that I read. It was okay, but it was filled with errors about popular culture that suggested to me either poor editing, or that Bellow didn't know much about America.

Beyond his narrow intellectual circle...

Playing literalist today, are we?

Bellow's parents were shaped by a foreign culture, while he was shaped by both the remnants of that culture and his own experience growing up American. Thus, the dangling.

His father, by the way, has been described as "violent" by many, and as a "gangster" by some. Bellow was very close to ... and unsuccessfully protective of ... his mother, who died when he was 17. Icing on the cake: he had a near-death experience when he was 8.

Early experiences seem to shape the contents of the innate "god file" in the human brain. Culturally-atypical experiences seem to produce culturally-atypical conceptions of god.

Yes, so a rather stock formula for atheism, but not much of interest for the reader.

OJ:

Worth pointing out, though, that Bellow's Marxism waned and he defended America from the likes of Gunter Grass in his later years.

Matt:

Not exactly setting the bar high, are you?

Bellow soured on Marxism during WW2 when he realized what was wrong with it. Then he became one of the anti-communists. From the 1960s onward he has been assailing the academy for its insularity and rampant faddism (he authored the preface to Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind). While you may not like his writing, OJ, he really is the type of author for you.

Except that he's self-absorbed and unreadable. Even Roth at last started lighting into the Left. Where's Bellow's American Pastoral?

You just relate to Roth's AP because its geographic arc is almost precisely your own, oj. And Bellow regularly discredited the left. He just wasn't overt or pure enough about his conversion for fellow neo-cons (fellow second-generation Russian/Jewish/American ex-socialists) like Podhoretz the Elder.

The "stock formula" does not apply just to atheists, by the way. Those holding the god-concept of a perfect patriarch, for example, might usefully ask themselves why it is, precisely, that they are blind to the sins of the father.

OJ:

For Nobel literature laureates? No.

No one thinks their father perfect, only their mother.

My dad's perfect.

Matt:

Hardly a recommendation.

An exception to the stock formula, then, or a mystery? The Holy Trinity is mystical enough w/o grafting on The Holy Mother. Care to elaborate?

The question isn't whether you note your father's flaws but whether you're mature enough to get past them. Even Christ felt let down by His Father. It passed.

So I misread you? I thought you said everyone thinks their mother perfect. Did not compute unless one puts females on a purity pedestal.

And the ease with which one moves beyond the imperfections of the father is a function of many variables, not just "maturity". (Unless, of course, that's how one defines maturity.)

Yes, He never doubted Mary's love.

What else is maturity but accepting responsibility for onself and the imperfection of all.

Baseball.

I'll buy your working definition of maturity. But you know it don't come easy. Harder for some than others, and the reasons can be legion.

Sure. But why read someone who hasn't grown up?

You may be moving the goalposts here by implicitly redefining "maturity" to mean "coming home to Jesus." Now that, I won't buy.

As for Bellow, his artistry was gorgeous and his characters-in-constant-quest appealling on several levels. The quest is the holy grail and questions are the answer. The antithesis is a smug complacency.

Speaking of less-than-fully-mature writers, you prefer the perennially adolescent Kesey. Our man Randall may or may not be a savior figure, but he is undeniably a subversive revolutionary. Like Kesey himself and his hero Kerouac.

Not to Jesus, but to the realization of one's own relative lack of importance. Bellow never got there.

In his private life, Bellow did act like a man convinced of his own godliness. Every bit consistent with the father hypothesis. That failing need not reflect poorly on his work, though, any more than Kesey's eternal magic bus tour reflected on his. Both were fine writers.

OJ:

Well, recommending parents to people is the ultimate pointless exercise, so I won't try it...But what's wrong with having an unusually good parent?

Kesey wrote one good book that was the opposite of the rest of what he was saying--an utterly orthodox Christ narrative.

Outsider/savior narrative, like Blazing Saddles.