Seize the Moon

...Sammler eventually comes to see his planet as judged and rejected: "this death-burdened, rotting, spoiled, sullied, exasperating, sinful earth...

...Herzog has some of this novel's joyousness in isolated moments, but Herzog himself, in his venomous bitterness against his ex-wife and her lover, and his despair at the world, has little of Sammler's all-embracing (all-engraeing, really) compassion...

...Feffer's only rival in grotesquerie is Wallace, the high-I.Q...

...Sammler's Planet, not due from Viking until January...

...Bellow has no qualms about challenging Ulysses ("As it might not be many times more the room was filled with sunny light...

...Lai is not only the persuasive prophet of lunar colonization, he assembles such writers as Baudelaire and Rimbaud to be at once poets of space flight and space fliers themselves...

...Finally, the book's symbolism is too pat, and explained too neatly...

...When that tiny strand of yak hair is unraveled, there is the equally inconsequential quest for Dr...

...In a Nazi concentration camp, Sammler and his wife were part of a group of naked Jews who dug their own mass grave and were then machine-gunned and buried in it...

...Sammler crawled out of the grave alone, one-eyed and leaving a trail of blood, and survived the Nazis, the Polish anti-Semities, and the war, sometimes as a partisan, sometimes in hiding...

...Sammler's Planet are familiar and novelistic...

...He is 74 and one-eyed, however, and he plans to remain on the earth on which he was born, since "only what is modern can reach the moon...

...Wells, Sammler's old friend and hero, had argued the colonization of not only the moon but the planets, and the wonderfully archaic quality of his social optimism is prefectly recreated in the novel...

...Beyond that, Mr...

...Why, it was a metaphor for Ely"s condition...

...In the novel's deepest meaning, Sammler is a Lazarus come back from the dead as a sign of the Resurrection...

...Elya Gruner...

...Desperation for a subject has driven me to read, in the November and December issues of the Atlantic, Saul Bellow's Mr...

...Related to this sort of symbolic gigantism is an inflation of prose and tropes in the novel...

...Lai's pet project is the colonization of the moon...

...Sammler's friends and family have given him "a symbolic character" as "a judge and a priest...

...The book's season is "full spring," "the sun shone as if there were no death," and Sammler, "winter apple" that he is, spreads love to the unloved (he helps to bring Lai and Sammler's widowed niece Margotte together), and when the pickpocket, Feffer and Eisen get into a battle, Sammler rejects justice in favor of mercy for all...

...Sammler may not think highly of this moldy cantaloupe of a planet, but he will live on it until he dies, and his one eye observes it with an unblinking clarity...

...But these are relatively minor quarrels with a serious and often moving novel, about the actual world in which we live, not Tsarist manners or Polish manors...

...As we watch him in the present, Wallace floods his father's house by ripping open attic water pipes in quest of hidden money, and knocks the landing gear off a rented plane in scraping a neighbor's house...

...Sammler sees the street as 'a soft asphalt belly rising, in which lay steaming sewer navels...

...Artur Sammler was an Anglophile Polish-Jewish journalist who spent many years in London, a friend of H. G. Wells and the Fabians, and the novel is an endless play of his mind: in conversation, debate, and soliloquy...

...He is described as "this handsome, this striking, arrogant pickpocket, this African prince or great black beast...

...Sammler hears "broadcast Oriental jazz winding like dysentery through the bowels...

...As he and Sammler discuss this subject, the moral exhaustion of the earth (Mr...

...Lai's manuscript notebook, The Future of the Moon, has a Crusoe tone of severe practicality, the rational applied science of an overpopulated country...

...Perhaps the most wonderfully imagined of this gallery of eccentrics is Lionel Feffer...

...Lai's notebook, its pursuit, new disappearance, and eventual recovery...

...Bellow has always been a novelist of ideas, from the Dangling Man's declamations to Herzog's mad letters (it is the absence of any comparable intellectual content that makes such a work as Roth's Portnoy's Complaint seem so thin...

...He would be Christ, returned to judge the quick and the dead, or Odin, sacrificing his eye and hanging in torment to gain immortal wisdom, except that his powers are spurious and comical: he can judge between contending pleas but he cannot sentence or punish...

...Another weakness is a pastoral hokum about the majestic dignity of blacks, which earlier eroded Henderson the Rain King...

...There is cousin Walter, who confesses to Samm-ler (over Sammler's most determined efforts to silence him) his desperate fetishism for the plump hairy forearms of Puerto Rican girls, preferably cashiers making change...

...What is lacking is a true Aristotelian action, the relentless progress of Gatsby or Miss Lonelyhearts to death, of young Tarwater or Frank Alpine to conversion...

...Simla's theft and the Negro pickpocket's thefts clang together in the reader's mind, and soon they do so similarly in the author's prose ("she too was like the Negro pickpocket...

...The African chief here is the pickpocket, observed several times by Sammler plying his trade on the bus in a garb about as inconspicuous as a macaw's...

...The entire novel seems ready to take off into space...

...There is Artur Sammler's fey middle-aged daughter Shula, attending an endless stream of lectures in her wig of mixed yak and baboon hair, sitting with her shopping bag between her legs, stealing Lai's manuscript for her father as a "little demon-body" in space shoes...

...if we cannot interpret the symbolism of the pickpocket's exhibitionism, at least Bellow can ("He showed the patent of nobility and let the obvious conclusion be drawn-don't fight the king...

...Sammler's Planet is its intellectual content...

...The other great charm of Mr...

...Bellow is an old pro, and the virtues of Mr...

...Much in this novel, to use Thoreau's phrase, speaks to our condition...

...or, rather, are the reverse of Bellow's gift for contemporary Shandyism...

...Bellow's willingness to deal in stock figures can be seen in his allegorical names: "Feffer" (pepper) for his liveliness, "Eisen" (iron) for his will or his medallions, and so forth...

...Sammler's Planet shows an obvious effort to recapture the spirit of a work many regard as Bellow's finest, Seize the Day, in its return to the refugee Jewish milieu of the upper West Side and its ending on Sammler praying for his dead nephew Elya...

...His characters come alive for us and bring along with them their milieu, which, except for an Indian savant named V. Govinda Lai and an unnamed Negro pickpocket, is the Jewish refugee world of the upper West Side of New York...

...At the time of the novel's action Wallace handicaps sporting events...

...Lai and the black picketpocket have their eccentric features too, but as aliens to this displaced European world they are observed more respectfully...

...Sammler's planet has certain weaknesses which seem inseparable from its virtues...

...Wallace flooding his father's attic with water foreshadows the burst artery flooding Elya's brain with blood, but Bellow is afraid that we might miss it ("First, how apt it was that Wallace should flood the attic...

...All of our Melvilles seem to be engaged in writing their Pierres (Ada's Goat Couples), while the young fiction writers are slick and superficial, or pursue what Stephen Dedalus called the improper arts, the didactic and pornographic...

...Sammler's planet, in a sense) and the need for man to start fresh on the moon, the novel becomes delightfully lunatic...

...as a priest he can hear confessions but he cannot absolve...

...Most of it has to do with Shula's theft of Dr...

...Shula smiles "as if she had eaten a plateful of divine forbidden soup...

...before that he traveled from North Africa to the Soviet Union on horseback, lost his father's Rolls Royce in one of New York City's reservoirs, drove a crosstown city bus for a living, and became an airplane pilot...

...Finally there is Eisen, Shula's separated husband, who arrives from Israel to make his fortune as an artist in America, his artworks consisting of metal medallions of the most repulsively touristy sort...

...The biophysicist Dr...

...It has no significant action, and the plot seems contrived and trivial (like the theft of the baby in Roth's Letting Go...

...A Columbia student, he is so caught up in worldly involvement that when he brings Sammler to lecture at a Columbia seminar he must desert him (throw him to the militant wolves, in fact) in order to take a telephone call about one of his business ventures, buying a diesel locomotive and leasing it to the Penn Central for tax advantages...

...In which familiar human postures were struck...

...From which no great results had come in the past...

...If we may take Sammler to be Bellow's mouthpiece, as I am sure that we may to a considerable extent, he sees that world critically and sardonically, affirming the values and standards of an earlier time, trying as it were to hold Hadrian's Wall, however thin his garrisons, against the new Picts...

...or Moby-Dick ("To see the sidereal archipelago is one thing, but to plunge into them, into a dayless, nightless universe, why that, you see, makes sea-depth petty, the leviathan no more than a pollywog...

...moron son of Sammler's wealthy nephew and patron, Dr...

...When the pickpocket discovers that Sammler has been watching him, he follows the old man into the lobby of his apartment house and displays to him a sign of his power, not a knife or a gun, but his naked penis, described in terms that might be more appropriate to the largest tuna caught off Bimini in a season...

...the sun ran up from the sea like a red fox...

...Sammler accepts the half-moral, half-pragmatic position that the earth deserves to be abandoned, and although he does not himself intend to leave, he achieves a kind of "earth-departure objectivity," and feels that "perhaps colonies on the moon would reduce the fever and swelling here...

...From which little could be expected at this late hour...

...What he can do is criticize or forgive in a human capacity, and it is Sammler's extensive compassion for not only friends and family but for all the human world beyond them that distinguishes this novel...

...Gruner's hidden cash, and when that too is exhausted, Bellow has no way to end the novel but to kill off Gruner...