Volume 3, Number 5 · October 22, 1964
King Saul
By V.S. Pritchett
Herzog
by Saul Bellow
Viking, 347 pp., $5.75
Saul Bellow is the most rewarding of living American novelists. Even when he is only clever, he has a kind of spirited intellectual vanity that enables him to take on all the facts and theories about the pathetic and comically exposed condition of civilized man—not woman, however—and distribute them like high-class corn so that the chickens come running to them. That is the art of the novelist who has ideas: to evoke, attract that 'pleasing, anxious being.' the squawking, dusty, feverish human chicken. A fictioneer, like Aldous Huxley, could always throw the corn but nothing alive came fluttering to it.
Review, 1965 words
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