Volume 10, Number 6 · March 28, 1968
Bellow's Purgatory
By Alfred Kazin
It has been a bewildering experience, these last few years, recognizing how many new American novelists ask—and expect—nothing more for themselves in the kingdom of literature than the undependable status of being considered 'interesting.' The novel, which by the middle of the nineteenth century had clearly become the central and all-expressive form that formerly the ancient epic and Elizabethan tragedy had each been in its turn, had markedly, by the middle of the twentieth century, become for many of its practitioners just another avant-garde defiance by intellectuals, as self-consciously specialized in its relation to the visible world, to the universal cycle of human experience, as those other hifalutin' skills that bring renown to the specialist but not much pleasure or enlightenment to the rest of us.
Feature, 4473 words
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