Volume 31, Number 12 · July 19, 1984
Winter's Tales
By Robert M. Adams
Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
by Saul Bellow
Harper and Row, 294 pp., $15.95
Chicago, that gritty city, has a hammerlock on Saul Bellow's imagination, and has held it there for a long time. Even when he takes his fictional characters elsewhere, they carry Chicago with them, and come back to Chicago for final authentication. (Henderson the Rain King, that gross and glittering piece of foolery, is an exception to this rule, as to many others in Bellow's work.) It is not that Bellow idealizes his adopted city, not at all; his feeling seems something like that suggested by Nelson Algren when he said (I quote from memory and approximately) that living in Chicago was like making love to a woman with a broken nose. Bellow is always quarreling with Chicago, sometimes for being what it is, sometimes for not being what it used to be; but Chicago names and neighborhoods are generally present in his fiction, often as shorthand for attitudes and values of which they are redolent.
Review, 1812 words
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