Volume 12, Number 5 · March 13, 1969
Chasing Reality
By Jack Richardson
Mosby's Memoirs
by Saul Bellow
Viking, 160 pp., $5.00
Toward the end of Saul Bellow's last novel, Herzog's wild ruminations are pierced by a very real horror when he wanders into a courtroom where a man and woman are standing trial for infanticide. The woman—semi-retarded, dim, brutalized—had, in a fit of fury, dashed her son to death against a hotel wall while her lover lay casually smoking in bed. From the vision of the dead child's uncomprehending terror Herzog's mind spins to his own daughter, who is kept from him by his ex-wife and her domestic consort Gersbach, the erstwhile friend who managed first to cuckold Herzog and then to usurp his role as father. Herzog's glimpse in the courtroom of unthinkable human viciousness clears away the ambiguities around which he has wrapped his domestic situation, and, for once, instead of writing a letter or monograph about it, he sets out with an old family gun to rescue his daughter and do battle with those who have abused his heart. But when he sees the man he wishes to kill through a bathroom window in the act of tenderly washing his, Herzog's, child, he falters, and reverts to his old self.
Review, 2422 words
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