Volume 29, Number 3 · March 4, 1982
Point of Departure
By Diane Johnson
The Dean's December
by Saul Bellow
Harper and Row, 312 pp., $13.95
Ernst Gombrich in Art and Illusion talks about those pictures which appear to be one thing until you perceive a different pattern, whereupon the rabbit turns into a goat, the can-can girl into a hag in a bonnet. Once you've seen both, you can then have either perception, but not the two at once. Saul Bellow's new novel is like this, a novel about Albert Corde, an American spending December in Rumania, or a novel about conditions of American society presented through the meditations and conversations of the same character, removed from the scene, in a situation that affords certain opportunities for comparison and reflection. Either novel disappears when the other is focused on. The pattern of the social novel is the more insistent and interesting, but the Corde novel rivalrously endangers it.
Review, 2107 words
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