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A review by levitybooks
Herzog by Saul Bellow
3.0
As in Humboldt's Gift, Bellow perfectly captures the midlife crisis of a weak and failing professor. The problem is that these aren't the people you wouldn't want to invite or talk to at a party, let alone spend a whole book with. Being a PhD student in Neuroscience, one of the most navel-gazing academic disciplines ever, it's hard to believe these professor characters can be 'this' in their heads. It feel like an unintentional caricature of analysis-paralysis, or the dithering intellectual, given the reality given to all else in the story.
Charlie Citrine in Humboldt's Gift has lost a wife and is chasing a new woman, he is weathered and bitter but still a man going down with a fight. By contrast, Moses Herzog in Herzog is utterly ruined by his divorce. I don't know if I want to know what a desperate man spying through his ex-wife's window is feeling? I don't know if there's something to learn about playing life from griping like this. The melodrama in The Sorrows Of Young Werther were more enlightening than this, if you're going to be sad then let it be a flood for the reader. Don't drag me into a plodding frail drone of dejection with you, damn it!
Charlie Citrine in Humboldt's Gift has lost a wife and is chasing a new woman, he is weathered and bitter but still a man going down with a fight. By contrast, Moses Herzog in Herzog is utterly ruined by his divorce. I don't know if I want to know what a desperate man spying through his ex-wife's window is feeling? I don't know if there's something to learn about playing life from griping like this. The melodrama in The Sorrows Of Young Werther were more enlightening than this, if you're going to be sad then let it be a flood for the reader. Don't drag me into a plodding frail drone of dejection with you, damn it!