Even More on Bellow
Perhaps as a Bellow admirer I’m just more attuned to it, but it seems to me that the amount of press generated by Bellow’s death has been really extraordinary. Looking for yesterday’s piece by A. O. Scott on the New York Times website this morning, I notice that the Times — just one paper — has done nine pieces on Bellow since his death on Tuesday:
Saul Bellow, Who Breathed Life Into American Novel, Dies at 89
By MEL GUSSOW and CHARLES McGRATH, Published: April 5, 2005A Parade of Humanity: The Complete List of Saul Bellow’s Books
BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, Published: April 5, 2005Saul Bellow, Poet of Urban America’s Dangling Men
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, Published: April 6, 2005Saul Bellow: A Writer Captivated by the Chaos of New York
By JOSEPH BERGER, Published: April 7, 2005Master of the Universe
By IAN MCEWAN, Published: April 7, 2005Mr. Bellow’s Planet
By BRENT STAPLES, Published: April 7, 2005Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow, Let Down Your Hair
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, Published: April 9, 2005Bellow’s Democratic Nobility of the Intellect
By DAVID BROOKS, Published: April 10, 2005Saul Bellow, America’s Poet of Urbanity
By A. O. SCOTT, Published: April 10, 2005
Anyhow, Scott’s piece, though otherwise not exceptional, included this observation:
The postwar American novel resembles, for the most part, a suburb, populated by standardized ciphers who dream of becoming characters and wonder (along with their readers) why they can’t quite succeed. But Bellow’s books, refusing to flee the cities — even in the face of nihilism and social crisis — are like cities unto themselves: densely populated, often messy and full of the contradiction and cacophony that make up the true noise of civilization.
I thought about this again this morning when I was reading — the Times again — an article about a new series in the Atlantic in which French philosopher Bernard Henri Lévy — retraces Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1831 journey through America:
I thought about this again this morning when I was reading — the again — an article about a in the in which French philosopher Bernard Henri Lévy retraces 1831 journey through America:
And in the deserted factories and office buildings of Cleveland and Detroit and Lackawanna, N.Y., he sees an enigma about America, something missing that is taken for granted in Europe: “a love of cities.”
