'Our Crazy Species'

...If it sounds a bit curious and unlikely, that is only the beginning...

...From the time he first sees the pickpocket on the Riverside Drive bus, Sammler is obsessed with him, with unexpected consequences...

...Sammler's metaphysical musing as the novel's lonely virtues, the elements that should provide the perspective that would not so much set this cockeyed world in order as provide it with a unifying intellectual context...

...He is too much of a professional for that...

...There is a moment late in the novel when Mr...

...Into this moderately placid existence comes an elegant black pickpocket, wearing a camel's-hair coat, a homburg, Dior sunglasses, and a single gold earring...

...We are an animal of genius...

...registrar of madness," has known more than his share of drama and tragedy...

...Once a Polish journalist in London, where he was a friend of many of the best minds and commanding talents of the prewar period...

...Into Sammler's life also comes the fact that his nephew, the man who brought him to this country with his daughter after the war, now lies dying...

...Sammler's question, "Is our species crazy...

...Neither, I fear, does the reader...

...Sammler's Planet exists primarily to provide Mr...

...At least not on the basis of Bellow's 300-page lecture-demonstration...

...There are still human qualities...

...Since the early events of the book nearly all lead on to occurrences even more farfetched, Bellow obviously doesn't expect his thoroughly unconvincing framework to be taken literally...

...curate of wild men and progenitor of a wild woman...

...Reviewed by Catharine Hughes God may or may not be in His Heaven, but obviously all is not right with Mr...

...Not with the world in which its seventy-plus protagonist lives, and certainly not with Saul Bellow's often tedious new novel...

...It becomes, instead— and with all respect to both Bellow's craft and his purpose—something of a bore...

...Labyrinthian and apocalyptic though it is, that musing simply is not stimulating enough to make a successful novel...

...the survivor of a Nazi prison camp, where he lost both his wife and the sight in one eye, he now lives on the upper West Side of New York, a sort of philosopher in residence, observer of the world's ills and idiosyncracies...

...Its bizarre characters and often unbelievable events seem to exist merely as foils, affirmative testimony to Mr...

...Interspersed with all this is an effort to uncover money supposedly concealed in the pipes of the dying nephew's attic and a venture involving the labeling of trees with the aid of a plane...

...For all the incidental diversions and despite Bellow's often elegant style, the result is surprisingly unrewarding...

...But, a moment later, he reflects to himself that although this was something he often thought, "he did not thoroughly feel it...

...if it sounds like a comic novel, it is not...

...Sammler and Mr...

...Sammler observes, "There is still such a thing as a man —or there was...

...Our weak species fought its fear, our crazy species fought its criminality...

...And, finally, into it comes the increasing eccentricity of that daughter, married to an insane, toeless Israeli artist, who makes off with the manuscript of a book called The Future of the Moon, the work of an Indian scientist, in an effort to aid her father in a memoir on H. G. Wells she imagines he is writing...

...Sammler with the opportunity for periodic reflections on the state of man and the state of the world...

...This leaves us with Mr...

...Arthur Sammler, "confidant of New York eccentrics...