It’s been a year since I read this review in City Journal of Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow’s 1970 masterpiece, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. That’s how long something has to stand in line when it gets onto my to do list.
This young curmudgeon loved every page. The City Journal review lauds it largely for its precision in describing the squalid conditions of late-60’s/early 70’s New York City. The first chapter, especially, is a delicately, surgically rendered reproduction of a previously fine world that’s fraying, splitting, flying to pieces.
After about fifty pages I regretted reading a library copy and not buying it, because almost every page had these exquisitely quotable axioms about life that seemed like natural landmarks. I wanted to underline them and keep them. They belong in a museum. Here’s just one: “Perhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder.” Yes.
This is also the most literate, philosophical book I’ve ever read. Usages of classic literature appear almost as frequently as the word “the.” Not just references–usages. No name dropping, but elements of everything from Norse mythology to Ulysses integrated into the text, gorgeously.
That actually leads to the book’s only soft spot: some of the book’s long, thoughtful rambles get to be too abstruse. The best example here is the extended conversation between Sammler and Dr. Lal in the penultimate chapter. There’s nothing wrong with a story that requires intense concentration–it’s a refreshing change of pace, really–but it can get to where the author is almost babbling to himself. Bellow’s ruminations are strangely original in their reactionary throwback fashion, but he likes to go so deeply into them that one almost wonders if the reader is even meant to follow along, or if the novel has just become Bellow’s personal journal.
But the failure here is probably mine–I need to read again, and closer.
After I’d added Mr. Sammler’s Planet to my to do list for the year, I read this review of it over at A Commonplace Blog. The discussion there mostly wrestles with the apparent racism and sexism in the book. The comments there take it for granted that those things exist. I disagree. Bellow has Sammler describe the world as it is. The world that Sammler lived in was full of violent crime predominantly committed by minorities and sexual flakiness in women that resulted from the sexual revolution. None of the descriptions are meant to be comprehensive, however. Bellow allows ample room for most people of any background to be perfectly normal, and none of his characterizations imply any inherent flaw in anyone because of race or gender. His language communicates only that a lot of the young people around him were disappointing and scary.
I can relate. It was invigorating to read a culturally conservative novel of such prestigious quality. I doubt it could have been published today.
Besides, studying the book from the angle of the encounters with a minority criminal at the beginning and end of the book ignores the far more worthy facet in the middle that gives the book what fairly little plot it has, the plot that gives the book its name: the speculative manuscript by the Indian doctor. That story is far more fascinating, and I can hardly imagine anything more imaginative outside of science fiction itself. The serious tone of parts of this book give it a comic absurdity that–forgive me–I can only compare to Napoleon Dynamite. In a book that alludes to Aristotle and Proust!
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
–William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Final Grade: A-
Gently Hew Stone 