The Dean's December (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Very talky
Review: Having only recently begun reading Bellow I have found him to be an admirable guide to the way contemporary man thinks about the world and particularly human relationships. Although the characters sometimes seem a little too involved in philosophical wool-gathering to be true, their ruminations provide critical insights into the way our society is constructed. In The Dean's December, the contrasts are between the decaying society of late communist Rumania and the problems of society in contemporary Chicago. The Dean is in Rumania to be with his dying mother-in-law, a formerly powerful party official who has been ostracised for allowing her daughter,an internationally famous astronomer, to emigrate to the west.. The Dean, who is a respected journalist has ruffled powerful feathers in Chicago with a series of pointed articles critical of certain aspects of Chicago society and has also been involved in seeking justice in a case where one of ! his students has been murdered. In this he is opposed by his radical nephew who thinks that the case is racist because the accused are African Americans of deprived social origins. Bellow is a master of setting the scene - the bleak December weather echoes the coldness of communist and capitalist society, the cheerless bureaucracies and intricate politics of both settings. As well as societies problems, the Dean must also confront his own mortality as he watches his beloved mother-in-law die and the reactions of his wife and slightly eccentric relatives to this stress. This is a book which will repay several readings. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: When Gravity Becomes An Insult
Review: Of course, there's no telling what the reception of a Nobel Prize can actually do to how a prizewinner relates to his work or material. Does he simply keep up the good work and satisfy himself with more of the same? Or does he feel compelled to stretch out a little, tackle tougher terrain, become a world spokesman, a kind of Bob Geldof of the academic world? Or does he simply pull up the stakes altogether and move to, say, Parnassus? While critics have expressed mild dissatisfaction with the post facto work of one of those Nobel winners, Saul Bellow, mainly because what some believe to be an unecessary discursiveness has crept into his later novels, Bellow's previous work is often so tongue-in-cheek and humorously numinous that it is easy to dismiss the dismissers as perhaps having read "The Dean's December" too superficially. Bellow's first novel after the Nobel watermark, in many ways, then, seems to betray the author's early attempts to keep up with the reputation he has gained: Big subjects, high blown philosophy, windy passages. But what else would you expect from Bellow, a man who hails from Chicago, the Windy City?

It's bleak and apocalyptic in the Romania where Albert Corde, a prominent Chicago university dean begins his story. The depths of an East European winter made even colder by the moribund Communist dictatorship whose presence is felt everywhere seems nearly as leaden as the sallow plum brandy he sips as if it were contraband in the decaying parlor of his wife's ailing mother, Valeria. As the old woman, once a favored Communist official, now a sweetheart of an aging underground of pale faces and flowery dresses, slips into the slow throes of an early death, Corde is emotionally consumed, not with the potent world into which he has been pulled, but with another one: Chicago, a city he seriously believes is in uproar over two scathing rants against its crime-ridden ghettoes he'd recently published in Harper's.

But, Bellow cunningly implies, such is the world of the American acadamy. A few cross words, perhaps bent towards the embarrassment of a number of pig-eyed public figures, and the next thing you know, you're a disgrace, a schmuck, a putz, the last guy anybody'd ever want to invite over for cocktails ever again. Not surprisingly, this queasy underbelly of the dissociative hyper-reality of America's upper classes is part of the price of our American comfort. It's a price of not really wanting to look, or of not quite knowing how, the cost of having willfully pulled away in both disgust and inadequacy from the often invisible reality of the downtrodden, tucked out of sight as they are in every major American city. Of course, the Romanian government has several quite neat solutions to the problems of public insolence. While Valeria's position as a political pentitent isn't beyond Corde's understanding, however, he seems beyond all that just the same.

The bottom line? Corde's protected public role as the Dean of the School of Journalism has done nothing to protect him. He's worried about his job. He sticks out like a burn victim in the faculty lounge. He's worried about who he is, who he might become. Worried most of all about what the papers are saying, especially in light of the fact he's also managed to have gotten both himself and the university ensnared in a legal fracas involving a pimp, a whore, a murdered college student and his quasi-Marxist nephew, Mason--a typically Bellowish twist as the sublime and the vulgar mingle and become the ludicrous.

Struggle as he might to find a way to meet the world in terms that actually make sense, Corde seems to know he's going to fail, and perhaps even become the embodiment of how out-of-touch public debate is from realities that are pressing in from every side. For him, poverty in a tenement, with its screaming, its dinge, its stench, its hopelessness and frustration are nothing but abstractions. While he might be in a position with enough influence to bring the bad news to the surface, still he's barely aware that the situation is as alien to his ways and means as it is astronomical.

Saul Bellow is famous for railing at Chicago. He's been grilled for it. And doubtless he has first-hand knowledge of how it feels to shake the dust out of the rug when company is in the room. Furthermore, as a literary icon, Bellow more than likely has an intimate understanding of how askew the academic and mundane worlds in America are from one another. Perhaps Bellow just can't help it. He's writing what he knows. And so what if a close examination of our vaunted intellectuals proves they're clowns?

Rating:
Summary: When Gravity Becomes An Insult
Review: Of course, there's no telling what the reception of a Nobel Prize can actually do to how a prizewinner relates to his work or material. Does he simply keep up the good work and satisfy himself with more of the same? Or does he feel compelled to stretch out a little, tackle tougher terrain, become a world spokesman, a kind of Bob Geldof of the academic world? Or does he simply pull up the stakes altogether and move to, say, Parnassus? While critics have expressed mild dissatisfaction with the post facto work of one of those Nobel winners, Saul Bellow, mainly because what some believe to be an unecessary discursiveness has crept into his later novels, Bellow's previous work is often so tongue-in-cheek and humorously numinous that it is easy to dismiss the dismissers as perhaps having read "The Dean's December" too superficially. Bellow's first novel after the Nobel watermark, in many ways, then, seems to betray the author's early attempts to keep up with the reputation he has gained: Big subjects, high blown philosophy, windy passages. But what else would you expect from Bellow, a man who hails from Chicago, the Windy City?

It's bleak and apocalyptic in the Romania where Albert Corde, a prominent Chicago university dean begins his story. The depths of an East European winter made even colder by the moribund Communist dictatorship whose presence is felt everywhere seems nearly as leaden as the sallow plum brandy he sips as if it were contraband in the decaying parlor of his wife's ailing mother, Valeria. As the old woman, once a favored Communist official, now a sweetheart of an aging underground of pale faces and flowery dresses, slips into the slow throes of an early death, Corde is emotionally consumed, not with the potent world into which he has been pulled, but with another one: Chicago, a city he seriously believes is in uproar over two scathing rants against its crime-ridden ghettoes he'd recently published in Harper's.

But, Bellow cunningly implies, such is the world of the American acadamy. A few cross words, perhaps bent towards the embarrassment of a number of pig-eyed public figures, and the next thing you know, you're a disgrace, a schmuck, a putz, the last guy anybody'd ever want to invite over for cocktails ever again. Not surprisingly, this queasy underbelly of the dissociative hyper-reality of America's upper classes is part of the price of our American comfort. It's a price of not really wanting to look, or of not quite knowing how, the cost of having willfully pulled away in both disgust and inadequacy from the often invisible reality of the downtrodden, tucked out of sight as they are in every major American city. Of course, the Romanian government has several quite neat solutions to the problems of public insolence. While Valeria's position as a political pentitent isn't beyond Corde's understanding, however, he seems beyond all that just the same.

The bottom line? Corde's protected public role as the Dean of the School of Journalism has done nothing to protect him. He's worried about his job. He sticks out like a burn victim in the faculty lounge. He's worried about who he is, who he might become. Worried most of all about what the papers are saying, especially in light of the fact he's also managed to have gotten both himself and the university ensnared in a legal fracas involving a pimp, a whore, a murdered college student and his quasi-Marxist nephew, Mason--a typically Bellowish twist as the sublime and the vulgar mingle and become the ludicrous.

Struggle as he might to find a way to meet the world in terms that actually make sense, Corde seems to know he's going to fail, and perhaps even become the embodiment of how out-of-touch public debate is from realities that are pressing in from every side. For him, poverty in a tenement, with its screaming, its dinge, its stench, its hopelessness and frustration are nothing but abstractions. While he might be in a position with enough influence to bring the bad news to the surface, still he's barely aware that the situation is as alien to his ways and means as it is astronomical.

Saul Bellow is famous for railing at Chicago. He's been grilled for it. And doubtless he has first-hand knowledge of how it feels to shake the dust out of the rug when company is in the room. Furthermore, as a literary icon, Bellow more than likely has an intimate understanding of how askew the academic and mundane worlds in America are from one another. Perhaps Bellow just can't help it. He's writing what he knows. And so what if a close examination of our vaunted intellectuals proves they're clowns?

Rating:
Summary: A Soul's December in The Wilderness
Review: The third world and Chicago have a lot in common. Not just the inner city Chicago or America but our innermost being.This is what Mr. Bellow takes on in a sometimes remarkable way.

The sometimes similar worlds of dispare and crime in Eastern Europe and Chicago meet on the soul's battle field, fighting to give people meaning to their lives.

In the end what's left? The cold dark universe or the heaven where God dwell's and ulitimately must come and save us.

Mr. Bellow puts a lot on your mind and not always perfect prose, he could have left the monkey and typwriter line out of this book, but a very enjoyable read.

Rating:
Summary: Very talky
Review: This was my first (and thus far, only) Bellow novel, and I can't say I'm racing to pick up another. I had very high expectations, which were not met. Although passages of this book are quite beautiful and sensitive (most of which concern his wife and her dying mother) I was overwhelmed by how Bellow uses the main character as a megaphone through which to pontificate on contemporary race relations. He dramatizes nothing and leaves nothing for the reader to do. The setting, side by side, of a racially-inspired murder in Chicago and the death of an old woman in a communist country is certainly interesting, but way too subtle for me, especially in light of how heavy-handed Bellow is in other parts of the narrative. Still, I read this novel over two years ago and am still thinking of it; parts of it come back to me like a sepia-toned postcard, very fleeting.