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Rating: 
Summary: "I am alone ten hours a day in a single room..."
Review: "There was a time when people were in the habit of addressing themselves frequently and felt no shame at making a record of their inward transactions." So begins Bellow's first novel and one of the most consistently excellent oeuvres in American fiction. It's Chicago, 1942, and in preparation for his imminent draft into the army, Joseph has given up his job and moved himself and his wife into one-room lodgings in a boarding house. That was nine months ago and the draft letter hasn't come. Joseph is dangling - alienated, without real purpose, but no longer distracted by the banal minutiae of everyday working life. He begins to see the absurdity of social roles, the hypocrisy of long-held ideologies, and the horror of life without routine. Breaking from friends and family, Joseph observes the slow disintegration of his social self. Significantly, while unthinking discipline is offered as one way out of such a nightmare, we're not encouraged to see this as the only or best solution. Bellow never comes down on one side or the other. This announces one of the central themes of Bellow's work generally: that there is a big difference between thinking and having an idea. Thinking involves a free opposition of ideas, and it raises the work from the level of a tract to the level of art. The opposites are free to range themselves against each other, and they are passionately expressed on both sides. At its best, it is energetic, passionate, and open. An idea, in contrast, is a state of closure which kills truth because it denies the multivalence of experience. According to Bellow, thinking is vital to a novel. The continuing dilemma which concludes most of his narratives may well be aimed at this effect. Thinking is still in progress - hopefully in your head. "Dangling Man" achieves this: Bellow doesn't tell us what to think, he invites us to think for ourselves. This novel is also notable for its bold project of bringing a European form - the sophisticated, introverted, philosophical diary novel - into the American mainstream as a deliberate antidote to hardboiled-dom, both in fiction and in life. Bellow adheres closely to its formal requirements: like his European forbears, Joseph is an alienated, bookish, unemployed part-time flaneur, part-time room hermit, whose impotence and hermetic isolation are underscored. Yet he has an unmistakable touch of America about him, which makes him all the more accessible for readers in the English-American tradition. Bellow puts American life under a European microscope, and finds the central issue much the same: the problem of being human.
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Summary: "The Right to be Answered!" - Fine Novel of Alienation
Review: Bellow's first novel is a finely written, tightly constructed little gem of American alienation. The main character has received his call-up papers for WW II, and is now waiting in a hotel room - dangling - as the weeks go by and he is still not called up. He begins to think about himself and those around him in a new light - being out of circulation, in enforced idleness, causing him to think about himself and others really for the first time. His detachment grows and he becomes stranger and stranger - or is it the others, his family, friends, work mates, passers by, who are getting stranger. One day in a cafeteria he goes really bonkers upon seeing an old political acquaintence from his youthful days in a radical party, who is now ignoring him. This leads to an explosive, almost surreal scene in which the dangling man is screaming about his "right to be answered" - which of course is a salesman's motto, the cold-caller's motto, while other people's supreme right is, of course, the right to personal privacy. This interesting question, that goes to the heart of what we are as Americans, is only one of the many interesting ideas thrown up by the young Bellow in this short book. If you like *Seize the Day,* you'll probably like this one, too. Bellow's shorter novels (I include *The Victim* in here, too) are among the best examples of American alienation ever written.
Rating:
Summary: More Sweets for the Sweet from Bellow
Review: It's a perplexing thing: Reviews for later Bellow books (Adventures/Augie March, Mr. Sammler's Planet) definitely reflect a certain (Hell, let's say ponderous) prejudice against Mr. Bellow's often philosophically charged, book-reference studded prose. The reviewers for this book, I see, are at least giving Bellow's difficult but rewarding style a shot...even if, as his first book, it should provide the abstract, the gel for future Bellow fabrications. Different readers...This short book is depressing, I'll say. The portrait of Joseph as he waits to be called by the draft in murky Chicago, as he becomes estranged from his wife and family and friends (he even assaults his niece), all the while relating his troubles to various authors' exemplary works (Goethe was mentioned by other reviewers); all this bound together under the umbrella of the atrabilious and taut war years (rationing, so on) does not make for the kind of reading one hopes to find in every bookshelf in Heaven (my apologies, agnostics and atheists). But, as is true of most great literature (was Arrowsmith, after all, a very happy book...except for the end), the sad aspects shouldn't be given a second thought. Just enjoy the incredible craftsmanship here. You'll thank the Five Star crowd.
Rating:
Summary: More Sweets for the Sweet from Bellow
Review: It's a perplexing thing: Reviews for later Bellow books (Adventures/Augie March, Mr. Sammler's Planet) definitely reflect a certain (Hell, let's say ponderous) prejudice against Mr. Bellow's often philosophically charged, book-reference studded prose. The reviewers for this book, I see, are at least giving Bellow's difficult but rewarding style a shot...even if, as his first book, it should provide the abstract, the gel for future Bellow fabrications. Different readers... This short book is depressing, I'll say. The portrait of Joseph as he waits to be called by the draft in murky Chicago, as he becomes estranged from his wife and family and friends (he even assaults his niece), all the while relating his troubles to various authors' exemplary works (Goethe was mentioned by other reviewers); all this bound together under the umbrella of the atrabilious and taut war years (rationing, so on) does not make for the kind of reading one hopes to find in every bookshelf in Heaven (my apologies, agnostics and atheists). But, as is true of most great literature (was Arrowsmith, after all, a very happy book...except for the end), the sad aspects shouldn't be given a second thought. Just enjoy the incredible craftsmanship here. You'll thank the Five Star crowd.
Rating: 
Summary: the right to be answered...!
Review: Joseph, a would-be writer and intellectual, believes that intellectual and spiritual enlightenment is to be attained by isolating himself within the confines of a room in a cheap New York boarding house while he studies the great writers of the Enlightenment. But this dream of isolation is condemned to failure. While being alone, one is invariably made to drift away, lose certainties. His conclusion: "I had not done well alone. I doubted whether anyone could." I would like to highlight another favorite sentence: "If you have difficulties, grapply with them silently, goes one of their commandments. To hell with that! I intend to talk about mine, and if I had as many mouths as Siva has arms, and kept them going all the time, I still could not do myself justice."
THE VICTIM (1947) has a similar theme: how to cope with victimization and paranoia? Asa Leventhal, a Jew, enters the post World War II American workplace minus both parents and carrying with him his personal fears and a keen sense of the prevailing antisemitism. Joseph has to learn to conquer the anxieteis that paranoia, anger and self-isolation produce in him and admit his dependency on love and friendship, as well as his moral and social responsibility to others. While Leventhal searches for the truth about his tormentor and himself, he experiences the failure of the romantic quest and the dangers of stagnation and isolation. The real suffering comes from "not understanding", this is, from the deprivation of light.
Rating:
Summary: Good Read
Review: Saul Bellow writes another humdinger. This book was actually among (or even) his first, and you can easily see why it immediate sent his star soaring. This is a tale about a man who, as the title suggests, is dangling: He's dangling between civilian and military life (it takes place during WWII). He's also dangling between the socialism -- so fashionable among urban thinkers of the late 30s and war years -- and the more practical American capitalism that he seems to know he will have to embrace. Good one.
Rating: 
Summary: Some wonderful writing, but it sags in the middle
Review: The novel is very good when the narrator is talking to himself - his long introspective diary entries are compelling. However there are to many banal conversations between the narrator and his dull friends in the middle third. Doubtless Bellow is making a point in detailing these dialogues, but after a bit it gets boring and one longs for Joseph to get back to his favourite past times: talking to himself, asking the big questions (why am I here?, who is it that I'm going to war for?, etc) and having breakfast. Joseph and his aquaintances drink coffee and quote Shakespeare, Goethe and Spinoza a lot. He looks out over the slums of Chicago, smells the decay, observes the desperate people living their mean lives: is he going to go to war to fight for these wretches?; or is he going because he needs to get away from them? This is a novel with a small plot and a lot of interesting ideas. Bellow shows (convincingly) how Joseph's perspectives on himself, his life and the world change in the final 4 months before he joins up.
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Summary: fresh like new paint
Review: Yeah, I know it's a work of fiction, I know the people are made up, the events are all varied figments of Mr. Bellow's imagination. Certainly these things never quite happened in exactly this way, but I still think this book is about the way Saul Bellow felt at the time of his own draft board frustrations. When someone as skillful and gifted as Mr. Bellow sets down to slide out a crystalline picture of the truth, the world should take notice. It's rather comforting to know that a wider than expected portion has.
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