More Die of Heartbreak

Saul Bellow passed away today at the age of 89. The dean of American letters, followed by John Updike and Philip Roth, wrote some of the best post-war fiction but I seem to have only read his minor works. I've read his two early works The Victim and Dangling Man, which he says helped him to write his masterpiece The Adventures of Augie March. I hate to admit that I've only read about one-seventh of that book and it's on my To Read list, alongside Moby Dick and Madame Bovary. I read and enjoyed Herzog and wondered what the fuss was about Humboldt's Gift. Frankly, I enjoyed the sterile The Dean's December, which I read in a cramped Book of the Month Club edition with a small type on lousy paper, and the bitter Mr. Sammler's Planet than the exhausting and pointless Humboldt.

Oddly, one of the Bellow books I truly enjoyed was More Die of Heartbreak, which I read as a lifeguard at a retirement community and was the first book that signaled that the writer was growing old and his powers might be fading. I still remember passages and bits of dialogue. I loved the scene where the botanist who marries into a wealthy family realizes that his wife might not be the perfect match when he admires a plant that always sat beside her in their grand dining room and discovers that it is plastic. Nice.

I have read a good portion of Augie March but I remember Martin Amis' introduction where he advises the reader to stop looking for the Great American Novel -- this is it, he says. I'll read it and also finish the last hundred pages of Henderson the Rain King -- I think I read that Jack Nicholson was once set to play the violinist/pig farmer who goes to Africa to find his calling -- to complete my Bellow chase. I also have to re-read Herzog but if I return to More Die, I am almost certain it won't live up to my original enjoyment. Books are like flowers that way -- walk away and the petals fall.

I read the NY Times obituary and they didn't mention Bellow's work to champion William Kennedy. Legend has it that Bellow liked the Albany novelist's books and demanded that his publisher buy and distribute Kennedy's most recent work about a bum who tries to confront his ghosts in a lousy working-class city north of Manhattan. The book was Ironweed.

Saul Bellow is dead. John Updike and Philip Roth have just moved up a wrung.