We can’t say he didn’t warn us. On the very first page of his first novel, Dangling Man, Saul Bellow’s narrator-protagonist complains that in present-day America
the code of the athlete, of the tough boy . . . is stronger than ever. Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them . . . . If you have difficulties, grapple 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.
Bellow has been talking ever since. In the past forty-three years he has published ten novels, and whatever else one might find to say about them, they have (with only a single exception) been remarkably talky. And the savvy reader always knew who it was, really, doing the talking: the protagonist might have happened to go by the name of Artur Sammler or Moses Herzog or Charlie Citrine or Augie March, but when he began carrying on about sorrow and love and the emptiness of the heart and the meaning of existence in modern America, it was patently Bellow, and nobody else, who was speaking. This is not to deny that many of the things Bellow has had
