Saul Bellow, our most intellectual writer, mainlined the European novel of ideas into the veins of American literature and infused it with a high-octane style. His prose is exuberant, energetic, torrential; his voice intimate, learned, and allusive. His characteristic hero, a flawed, high-spirited highbrow, is—as he wrote in More Die of Heartbreak—“a genuinely superior individual, susceptible of course to human weakness and unable to manage his sexual needs … his love longings.”

James Atlas—who convincingly argues that “to read his books in consecutive order is to follow the contours of his biography” —has done exhaustive research, uncovering, for example, a well disguised description of Bellow in Heinz Kohut’s psychoanalytic case studies. He has mastered the sprawling material, and written an intelligent and perceptive, lively and absorbing narrative.

 

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