Bellow Is Back

...Widely hailed as this country's best novelist, Saul Bellow has won the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and even the allegedly biggest of them all, the Nobel Prize for literature...

...Corde contemplates a merger of morality, poetry, and science required for "the decisive struggle" to begin to "restore the strength of Humanism...

...So it may be a commentary on the intellectual tenor of the times that The Dean's December, Bellow's ninth novel and his first since Humboldt's Gift in 1975, surrenders to entropy even as it seeks to comprehend the disorder around us...

...Corde's energy collapses like a punctured balloon...

...Similarly, Bellow's real-life wife is Romanian...

...Bellow, a Chicagoan since age nine, has set several previous novels in the city, and is savvy enough about the place to provide Corde with a brother-in-law who "gives people the works" in "the city that works...

...Abe Peck (Abe Peck, a Chicago newsman turned academic, teaches at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone...

...Corde's attacks on a callous Chicago in the pages of Harper's unite academics, pols, and the newspapers in pursuit of his scalp...

...they attended her mother's old-country funeral...

...Moreover, the notion that Chicago has never been described "with style" is a conceit that one hopes is limited to Corde, and not shared by his creator...

...and The Dean's December gives vent to Bellow's feeling about a lumped-together East Bloc...

...Palomar observatory...

...It took him by surprise...

...Like Humboldt's Gift, which initially was conceived as a memoir of the poet Delmore Schwartz, The Dean's December began as non-fiction...

...He wrote about whirling souls and became a whirling soul himself, lifted up, caught up, spinning, streaming with passions, compulsive protests, inspirations...

...He hadn't meant to make such a stir," Bellow writes about those articles in Harper's...

...Flashy, elderly, corrupt Maxie, with his bold eyes and his illiterate, furiously repetitive eloquence, had a moronic genius for getting attention...

...He is besieged...

...They commit assault, robbery, rape in them...

...The killers are convicted, the dean must give up his job—plot elements rendered almost as afterthoughts...

...But his conclusion—"I almost think I mind coming down more" (than the cold)—seems less a rallying cry than a tepid exit line...

...In the sweepstakes to capture the city's mix of power and depravity, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make, and Mike Royko's Boss have more impact than 77!e Dean's December, which waters down any city-shaking jeremiads in bogs of rumination...

...A visit to the Robert Taylor Homes, a high-rise concentration camp hard by Lake Michigan, elicits this report from Mr...

...Well, sir, being afraid to go at night to the incinerator drop on each floor, they flush their garbage down the toilet...

...How do they break the commodes at such a rate...

...Corde's (mis)adventures, his searches for love and understanding, are vitiated by a funereal pace and a narrative imbalance that encases motion with glaciated ideas...

...A hit-man-turned-junkie forces his way into a hospital after an overdose, then cures himself by tenderly nursing a freaked-out patient he has had to subdue...

...Project guards, trapped like this, have had to surrender their guns...

...Jones, a building engineer: "We had ninety commodes in the warehouse last month, now we are down to two...

...As fire turns to ice, both the dean and The Dean's December wobble, teeter, and fall...

...Bellow's composite characters can capture some harrowing slices of real life...

...A centrist in search of wisdom, Corde is stretched so thin that he begins, in Bellow's phrase, "to whirl...

...Here is a multi-faceted thumbnail of Corde's feuding cousin, Max Detillion, who defends one of the accused slayers with much fanfare and an ulterior motive: "The source of Maxie's hatred was love gone sour, family wrangling...

...But Corde's critique of his own work also applies to Bellow's: "He never did get around to explaining how we must reconstitute ourselves...

...It's unfair to ask Bellow singlehandedly to solve the Problems of the Age...

...The elevators—those are the biggest headaches of all...

...At the same time, "he experienced a kind of airy anarchy...

...Corde even tosses down a literary gauntlet: "Did he want to~write about Chicago...

...Clearly Bellow is disturbed by this rigid two-tier society...

...Because of the incompleteness of his arguments, he confused many readers...

...He was maddened with imaginary wrongs...

...Bellow's dean, one Albert Corde, is a former newsman turned journalism professor and administrator...

...At the book's climax, Corde joins his astronomer wife at the chilly top of the Mt...

...We have had young men getting on the top of the elevator cabs, opening the hatch and threatening to pour in gas, to douse people with gasoline and set them afire...

...For once, it would be done with style...

...Lifted toward the heavens, he is inspired to call for a deeper, more soulful penetration behind the distortions of even scientific penetration...

...By pressing for the prosecution of two street blacks accused of killing a white college student, he pits himself against everyone from his smash-white-skin-privilege nephew to his cousin, a shyster lawyer...

...In Romania, where Corde and his wife must journey, he finds both his mother-in-law and freedom on their deathbeds...

...Even a meeting with an old school chum-turned-Lippmannesque-journalist ends in betrayal...

...But he neither analyzes causes nor suggests the slightest pragmatic solution forjhe injustices...

...In Chicago, where he lives, writes, and teaches, the mean streets are filled with Hog Butchery, Babbittry, and a ravaged underclass...

...The novel contains elements of a roman a clef and uses the screeds in Harper's as connective tissue...

...Bellow's ghetto glimpses are pungent, generally empathic yet wary of the unfocused violence that can boil up from the underclass, and, on at least one occasion, ster-eotypically questionable (court defendants wear "dashikis, ponchos, cloaks, African amulets, rings and beads—symbolic ornaments symbolizing nothing").' His ironies can be telling, as when he contrasts the South Side "dog-eat-dog" reality with a society birthday party for a fawned-over Great Dane...

...Still, Bellow can write like a diamond cutter...