More Die of Heartbreak
Bello, Saul
There are those who'll enjoy Saul Bellow's latest, which is easy to understand. But then there are those who'll admire it, which is harder. Over the years, Bellow has collected three National Book...
...Each boat has a Coast Guard I.D...
...Miss Osaka and Miss Nara put it in front of you, as literal as it was possible to be...
...Kenneth's former lover, who bore his child, is now living with a sadistic ski instructor in Seattle...
...What is there to like about this...
...But it should be type, asking about the radioactive ef- possible to appreciate the common fects of Chernobyl...
...But this is embarrassing...
...The general idea" of one of them "was to play the market from a spiritual base...
...The down-side of intellectual juggling is that nothing weighs much...
...There may have been a time when novelty made it seem refreshing,-but the bloom is off the ailanthus...
...In fairness, Kenneth, when he finally gets to Seattle, comes to an understanding with the mother of his child that is relatively sober and mature...
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...4. Misogyny...
...Crader begins to have doubts about her when he sees in her shoulders a resemblance to those of Tony Perkins in drag in Psycho...
...After fifteen years of unhappy widowerhood, Crader marries into the Layamon family, a clan of predators headed by a worldly and ambitious doctor...
...Excuse the language," Kenneth says early on...
...Trachtenburg teaches Russian lit, specializing in pre-revolutionary Symbolists (academic credentials are as important in Bellow's books as country houses in Jane Austen's...
...tions of consciousness, made you a more capable investor...
...Some success attended this, until the idea hit Fishl of telling his clients to get a large number of credit cards, say five hundred at a minimum...
...In More Die of Heartbreak we get American Express tours of Rozanov, Admiral Byrd, Philip Larkin, Swedenborg...
...He is met by an aged Japanese biophysicist in "an antique car built on perpendicular lines...
...Perhaps we're meant to pity Crader, or think less of him, for making rash sexual choices...
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...T his may be enough for enjoyment...
...You may wonder: If love sex...
...The old politician, for instance, has a son, Fishl Vilitzer, who is unlucky in his business ventures...
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...thing to an eminent, right-of-center man of letters...
...I'm in a hurry and I can't stop to pick and choose among the available terms...
...1. A tin ear...
...Bellow didn't clean up Kenneth's voice because Kenneth's voice is Bellow's—a clumsy and rather muffled echo of Jewish-American speech rhythms...
...That's no excuse...
...number for your protection...
...It may be that, just as the modern short story has been asphyxiated by the epiphany out of Dubliners, so the modern novel is choking on the monologue out of Ulysses...
...The women that Bellow heroes marry or fall in love with are either wet-dreams or witches...
...Which raises a last, non-literary is so dangerous, where are families sup- point...
...Meditation, by reducing the oscillaRichard Brookhiser, managing editor of National Review, is the author of The Outside Story (Doubleday...
...The only event we see, in real time, before our eyes, is a visit Kenneth pays to his old flame in Seattle...
...This is another Bellow standby—Shula, the daughter of the hero of Mr...
...Male relatives are also in all cases to be honored, however bizarre their personal habits, even Fishl Vilitzer...
...2 N / Don't Blame the Indians This is Ted Williams' definitive study of Native Americans and the mechanized destruction of fish and wildlife...
...Matilda Layamon, the luckless Benno's second wife, manages to be both...
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...But, as with the wickedness of wives, he always returns in the end to the talisman of assertion: Families are Good...
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...For that reason, conservatives have an extra temptation he title of the book takes off on to rate his fiction as highly as the T an answer Crader gives to a media world has rated it...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987...
...Since the death of Vladimir posed to come from...
...Crader at one point gives a lecture in Kyoto, where two of the book's more powerful vignettes underline the contrast...
...The compulsive intellectual chat with which Kenneth pesters his uncle, his parents, and the reader helps to distract him from thinking of his daughter and her mother...
...Demoralized for a time by this failure, Fishl next studied Chinese acupuncture, and presently set up a special practice as an acupuncture abortionist...
...Ted has spent the better part of the last two years researching this aspect of the Native American question...
...There's a Swedenborgian Church a block from my office...
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...More Die of Heartbreak concerns the misadventures of Benno Crader, a botanist who teaches at a university in a rustbelt city which is never named, though if you think of the White Sox and Pizzeria Uno, you'll be on the right track...
...Over the years, Bellow has collected three National Book Awards, a Nobel prize, and all the acclaim appertaining thereto...
...But everything here is lighter than air...
...Crader's host reads some of his own poetry, which has "a single theme: the old man's nurse—his nanny, whom seventy-five years ago he had deeply loved, and whohad passed away in 1912, when he was six or seven years old...
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...That night, some younger men take Crader to a crude Oriental sex show...
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...Bellow is Dickens for the Committee on Social Thought...
...Through his new in-laws, Crader becomes involved in a scheme to shake down a crooked machine pol, who happens to be Crader's uncle...
...Even if every syllable rang true, could we take so much talk...
...There is one class of women who escape the curse—blood relatives...
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...Bellow's recurring Big Theme is the inhumanity of modernity, which he dug into most deeply perhaps in Herzog...
...I am a phoenix," he says, "who runs after arsonists...
...There is the amusing whirl of ideas...
...Have credit card ready...
...There are occasional laughs, usually farcical...
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...In this connection, Bellow is worth comparing with Philip Roth, who draws on the same idiolect, but whose sentences are lithe and lively and, above all, varied, depending on who is speaking...
...It is a personal and sense of his occasional public gesmoral answer, but also, indirectly, a tures without inflating his gifts—political one...
...Each motorboat Lot...
...I'm no feminist, you understand, and I know American male novelists have a low batting average when it comes to female characters...
...Where action is concerned, this book makes The Golden Bowl look like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom...
...At four such passages per page, times three hundred pages, you get quite a build-up...
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...Again he was sued,' this time by a woman who had had a baby after receiving treatment...
...Sammler's Planet, was crazy, and her cousin was an abortionist, but because they were family, all was forgiven them—and it is related to the Big Theme: one sign of modern dislocation is the distance we are from family happiness...
...You'd get a better feel for botany if Benno Crader appeared in a novel by James Clavell...
...In the short passage quoted above, there are a dozen superfluous words...
...5. Family values...
...All Bellow characters sound alike...
...I'd always wondered what went on in there...
...Any letter postmarked after 30 days will be returned...
...Exp Signature or call: 1-800-458-4010 MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK Saul Bellow/William Morrow and Co./$17.95 Richard Brookhiser THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 43 There you have it—kith and kin, or about the modern world or the fair killer whores...
...Bellow's not tell- Nabokov, Saul Bellow is the closest ing...
...Bellow has one, so should you...
...2. A long attention span...
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...When you tire of the sexual acrobatics of Updike, the intellectual acrobatics of Bellow can come as a relief...
...The story is told by Crader's nephew, Kenneth Trachtenburg, who has troubles of his own...
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...1 But several other ingredients are necessary for admiration, and the reader must bring these to the task himself...
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...But he couldn't have gotten it for books like this one...
...But the effect of the book is to make us believe that most women out there are pyromaniacs...
...Barry Commoner especially when, as in More Die wouldn't say that more people die of of Heartbreak, they show so modest-anything, no matter how upset he was ly...
...How can people who are so unexceptionably precious in one kind of relation be so totally destructive in another...
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...The result is Don't Blame the Indians, a compelling examination of a problem for which Ted seeks not to assign blame, but to suggest, as he does in the final chapter, a novel and workable solution...
...Say what you like about America, but few countries have welcomed originality more warmly...
...Except in silent movies, I had never seen anything like it...
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...The girls felt the weight of the attention they were getting and seemed to know how much suffering they caused and how shaken their audience was...
...Ted Williams has developed an earned reputation as a brilliant and dedicated writer on topics important to anyone who loves the outdoors...
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...3. Dilettantism...
...Bellow also knows that families generate plenty of unhappiness, with no help from modernity...
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Vol. 20 • September 1987 • No. 9
