No one does it like Bellow. No one gets the rich contradiction of beauty and petty evil and above all fun of human existence. No one is as deadly on the page as him.
Thanks for this, but I do think you let him off the hook too easily on the Sammler point. The fact is that Bellow descended into reactionary politics, as many writers and artists do. It made his work worse. That book, in particular, is made worse for its racist depiction of the pickpocketer, which he doesn't do enough writerly work to distance the reader from. Many such (trotskyite) instances!
Nevertheless, Bellow remains an absolute favorite, a Chicago GOAT, and you did the best of him justice here.
Why would Bellows even want to "distance the reader from the racist depiction of the pickpocketer?" Humans don't live lives of cool, distant rationality. As much as we attempt to distance ourselves from the shadowy depths of our subconscious, it is there where our messy authentcity converges.
I agree. A writer depicts things as they are in any given historical time. The idea is not to hide racism or violence, etc. It's sadly part of human nature to some degree. Ugly but true.
you misunderstand me: what I mean is that the passage reads as the author's racism not just the character's. there is too much identification with the narrative voice to say 'this is just one man's perspective.'
The point to me is that it's not necessarily important or interpreted correctly. I am as sure that Bellow had some bigoted views as I am that my own family elders did and do, it was and is a stubborn part of the culture. However, he wrote about people of all kinds with an honesty that today reads as pure racism but at the time was an artist exploring the experiences and perspectives of different types. Wouldn't it be a little strange if Sammler, an aging European alive during the social upheavals of the 1960s/1970s America, *wasn't* a little bit racial in his views and experiences? The point of all this, in my view, is the application of this for Sammler's enlightenment: the pickpocket demonstrates that he has only and exactly as much humanity as Sammler and that's a tricky lesson for him in the novel. Anyway Stanley Crouch wrote a nice introduction to the Penguin edition of Sammler and is also interviewed in the PBS American Masters documentary on Bellow, and he clarifies a few things regarding this issue. There is more to it, simply, than "Sammler was a stand in mouthpiece for Bellow himself" (which is not accurate).
I get this, and it's been a few years since I read it, but as a longtime reader of Bellow my overriding impression that it was kind of a stand in for the author. I might be off base, but it is also consistent with his real life reactionary turn.
It isn't just one man's perspective, but that of all of messy humankind. You are analyzing what needs to be metabolized. Bellows is encourging us to get out of our heads and into our guts.
I think being able to distinguish between satire/critique and genuine racism is important when engaging with a novel in which Black people are depicted as barbaric lazy criminals. Otherwise, the 'woke' critique that we shouldn't even read the satire begins to make sense.
I do not think 'barbaric lazy criminal' is an accurate way of describing the pickpocket character. However, Bellow works to bring everyone, including Sammler, down to the basest, least rational versions of themselves. This is the point of the book.
In a way, Bellow saved my life. I was divorced, broke and broken. I took a copy of something huge and complicated back behind the house and started reading it. I can't tell you which one because it was forty years ago, but the book had a green cover and dense, meaningful, captivating prose that spoke directly to me and said enough that I understood I was not unique and there was more that life had to offer for me. Bellow, unique, fantastic and valuable. He was a treasure and the world will not see his like again.
Wow, it's like you're in my brain. Just this morning, I re-read A Silver Dish. Yesterday, I started reading Augie March. The only one of Bellow's novels I've read is Herzog, but I can already feel myself growing obsessed with him and his prose. Loved your thoughts about Bellow as a mystic--it gives me a new lens through which to read him!
I've read everything and go back to Saul again and again--and long ago decided he was a genius--despite the crazy life story. I lived in Hyde Park, Chicago, for five years near where he did--and got an earful.
And then there's Epstein's horrendous essay about him; he even says that _Seize the Day_ is a terrible book???? Then he goes on about the wives. Then there's his son Adam's New York Times piece after his father's death.
But still the work stands for all the reasons you say. I could go on, but you've covered the brilliance so well!
It's interesting that "Ravelstein" was the book that hooked you at the beginning. It contains some of the most indelible "Bellow Mysticus" moments, similar to the bit you quoted from "Humboldt's Gift."
First, there's the remarkable two pages starting on p. 82 of my Penguin edition; this mini-essay begins "That I was hard on myself, Ravelstein took..." This is one of the best pieces of writing describing pure experience of the world without any preconceptions, through the eyes of a child, that I have yet come across.
Second, there are the hallucinatory descriptions of Chick's illness after he eats the poisoned fish. This part complements the earlier part, because here Chick (who is obviously Bellow; the book is very autobiographical) is experiencing reality not as a child but as an old man, and through the haze of illness. But the sense of bumping up against natural phenomena unmediated is similarly strong.
Thanks so much for this wonderful and timely review of Bellow’s work. I keep hearing from once well read friends and most educated people I meet that they don’t read short stories. So many readers declare with some pride that they read only non-fiction, as if they’re on a higher cultural
level. But sorry to say I am beginning to understand because I keep reading tons of literary magazines and even The Best Short Stories of whatever year, and I finish feeling frustrated. Only a handful hold a structure, a coherent thought, some vibrant writing and consequently something to learn. What you show is a writer observing people, having deep refections on life, politics human nature. So I just checked out his collection of short stories and just the preface by his wife and the introduction offer a vibrant writer worth reading and learning from. And for flaws well…I can forgive…
I'm a lifelong reader and Saul Bellow has been and always will be one of my favorites. From Herzog to Henderson the Rain King to Humboldt's Gift there isn't a post-war American novelist who even approaches his greatness. Roth is dazzling but ultimately boring, Updike a water spider whose prose skims quickly by, only to be forgotten, Pynchon unreadable.
Well, good try, but honestly, MR. SAMMLER'S PLANET is indefensible and Bellow himself had a genuinely rotten character and I have some inside skinny on that. RAVELSTEIN is a terrible betrayal of Allan Bloom, whom Bellow pretended to be a friend and admirer of. I know everything is copy, but please. I'll sign on for HERZOG, a great deal of HUMBOLDT'S GIFT and, of course, SEIZE THE DAY, and I recognize and honor AUGIE MARCH'S very important place in the larger scheme of Am Lit. The late stuff seems to me to be preaching to the Committee on Social Thoughts choir, and I have never gotten what HENDERSON THE RAIN KING is actually about.
In no way am I writing Bellow off, but you have to take a whole lot of rough with the smoooth with him, and I can't quite shake my feeling that the ideas in his books are really so much decor.
Hi Gerald. Thanks for subscribing. There is a lot of truth in what you say, of course. His son Greg Bellow’s memoir was very enlightening on this: Young Bellow being left-liberal and sweeter like Augie, and Old Bellow becoming conservative and religious and harder like Sammler. (The two never got along once they were both older, right up until Bellow died.) No matter what backroom skinny you may have personally, I do think the news of Bellow’s poor character is out there, in two extensive biographies—but the point is that I do not see how this should effect how we appreciate his genius and his work.
As for Henderson, it’s about a rich guy who goes to Africa. And about a mid life crisis. And, mostly, it’s about making fun of goys.
Why would Sammler be indefensible? It’s a brilliant book. Because of one scene? Pardon the cliché, but if we’re dumping novels because of a scene say goodbye to Dickens, Dostoevsky, Burroughs and a thousand others.
And is it anymore indefensible than the work of Celine or Yeats, actual fascists? Mailer, Pound? The sentiments in Bellow’s books arise from the heart of a complicated, imperfect, perhaps indecent guy, but for that matter so does the work of Hemingway and Byron. I’m sure Bellow and I wouldn’t get along were we to have a political debate, but the point is that I don’t care. Virtually every great writer reveals uncouth things about themselves and people from their lives—Hemingway measuring an insecure Fitzgerald’s dick in A Movable Feast comes to mind—but as the man said “When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished” (Milosz, quoted by Philip Roth—yet another in our pantheon of American assholes). Meaning: that writer buddy of yours is going to use your grist for his mill. No way around this. And same as it ever was. Bloom (also a huge asshole btw) *wanted* Bellow to write about him. I have to think he was smart enough to know what he was getting into.
I read or heard elsewhere that you are not a Bellovian, and that’s fine, no need to say otherwise. One thing you might like to know though is that regarding Seize the Day, Bellow in interviews said he, in fact, identified himself more with the cruel father Dr. Adler. We readers see it as a paean to the struggles of the Tommy Wilhelms of the world, but that was not actually what the book was about (in Bellow’s view). This was always who he was, kind of a hard ass, because it was where he came from. Yet, much being up to the interpreting reader, I simply don’t see how it matters what Bellow thought he was writing. The novel speaks for itself.
I don’t have to tell you that writers are mixed up, often ugly, complicated people, and their public life gives us the luxury of being able to judge them. My move in this respect is to forget this, and judge them purely by their work—whether they’re perfect, or even terrible, people is really none of my concern. The ancients—all our pre-mass media writers and artists in fact—bask in a partially obfuscating bath of anonymity; our contemporary chumps, since the at least the 1950s, have their whole asses out for all to see. James Joyce said he never met a boor. I’ve never met someone without significant sin. The more they claim otherwise, the more they've sinned, in my experience.
As a reader I like good work. I could give a damn whether he was good to his friends, his postman or his cat.
Happy New Year! You’re one of my favorites by the way, and I would defend you even if it came out that you shot someone and mugged elderly women. That’s just the kind of art-fiend I am. All best, TD.
I loved this essay even where I bristled at some claims -- I'm happy enough to let a writer have politics that aren't easily discernable, which is different than a writer not having his politics. What I loved most here, though, was the indictment of Millenial tastes which I think weren't totally up to us and weren't totally our own fault. That pre-9/11 era of outrageous, naive consumption taught the whole cohort that all cultural artifacts are, like products, entertainments and always entertainments of equal validity (DFW gave me some of that language).
A very important person to me showed me Bellow and she set me on a path we couldn't have predicted, but even that was the result of early internet "if you like this you'll like..." commentary on who knows what primitive service. At the time, I was playing snowboarding games and first person shooters on a Nintendo 64, watching Eraserhead because it was the oddest tape at the local video store-- and a movie called Stageghost about a haunted stage coach, in which you could see the porta potty the crew was using in many scenes-- listening to "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" on the bus to school where slamming an X across your groin with your arms indicated you were down with NWO pro-wrestling. Friends were starting to get into Harry Potter, which I'm happy never to have read.
The luck, serendipity, and magic it took for one to develop one's tastes were not widely distributed. I make no claims for myself as a person with critical insight or intelligence, but often feel as if folks have been made simple by a simple culture, and not least because of this medium on which the conversation is being had. I mean, I see many Millenial adults wearing backpacks with pins and patches and wearing non-ironic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirts, joining D&D groups... All I ever wanted when I was young was to grow up. I'm still working on it, and Bellow has been a great help. This essay has helped me think through why that is.
Thank you for appreciating this giant of a writer! I just got a couple of copies of the Library of America Saul Bellow series that includes Augie March and Sammlers Planet.
So we're clear--except for the very few exceptions mentioned here, aughts fiction was BAD? Categorically? Uh huh. Sorry, but the Woods moniker has aged poorly enough that he had to partially clarify it (and gee, how well do categorical denunciations of periods of art tend to age?). I generally despise Post-Modernism--at least the bulk versions of it--yet still found that round-up startlingly casual. But I'll be sure to let Franzen, Smith, DeLillo and Pynchon know you don't approve.
Fortunately, I also didn't need to read all of that to appreciate Herzog.
Bellow is incredible. The political angle is just ridiculous, worrying about what an author's politics were/are. DFW was also a Republican. Camus and Sartre were communists, though Sartre clung onto full-on Stalinism and as a result Camus broke with him. Etc. Writers are complex people, as all artists are. We have to separate the art from the artist, and/or simply not care. Normal Mailer stabbed his wife in 1961, but I still LOVE Mailer. I don't aspire to BE these people, and I don't condone their personal behavior as human beings. But their writing is profound. People are people are people.
For sheer reading pleasure, his sentences are a delight. He makes periphrasis seem indispensable to any serious work of literature. He may lose the reader occasionally in the maze of ideas, arcane language and tortured sensibilities but the joy of interpreting and achieving even a proximate understanding of his intention if not his entire meaning is unequalled by other writing. Whenever his moronic inferno singes my white beard, I reread one of his novels to extinguish my despair of modernity.
No one does it like Bellow. No one gets the rich contradiction of beauty and petty evil and above all fun of human existence. No one is as deadly on the page as him.
Thanks for this, but I do think you let him off the hook too easily on the Sammler point. The fact is that Bellow descended into reactionary politics, as many writers and artists do. It made his work worse. That book, in particular, is made worse for its racist depiction of the pickpocketer, which he doesn't do enough writerly work to distance the reader from. Many such (trotskyite) instances!
Nevertheless, Bellow remains an absolute favorite, a Chicago GOAT, and you did the best of him justice here.
Why would Bellows even want to "distance the reader from the racist depiction of the pickpocketer?" Humans don't live lives of cool, distant rationality. As much as we attempt to distance ourselves from the shadowy depths of our subconscious, it is there where our messy authentcity converges.
I agree. A writer depicts things as they are in any given historical time. The idea is not to hide racism or violence, etc. It's sadly part of human nature to some degree. Ugly but true.
you misunderstand me: what I mean is that the passage reads as the author's racism not just the character's. there is too much identification with the narrative voice to say 'this is just one man's perspective.'
The point to me is that it's not necessarily important or interpreted correctly. I am as sure that Bellow had some bigoted views as I am that my own family elders did and do, it was and is a stubborn part of the culture. However, he wrote about people of all kinds with an honesty that today reads as pure racism but at the time was an artist exploring the experiences and perspectives of different types. Wouldn't it be a little strange if Sammler, an aging European alive during the social upheavals of the 1960s/1970s America, *wasn't* a little bit racial in his views and experiences? The point of all this, in my view, is the application of this for Sammler's enlightenment: the pickpocket demonstrates that he has only and exactly as much humanity as Sammler and that's a tricky lesson for him in the novel. Anyway Stanley Crouch wrote a nice introduction to the Penguin edition of Sammler and is also interviewed in the PBS American Masters documentary on Bellow, and he clarifies a few things regarding this issue. There is more to it, simply, than "Sammler was a stand in mouthpiece for Bellow himself" (which is not accurate).
I get this, and it's been a few years since I read it, but as a longtime reader of Bellow my overriding impression that it was kind of a stand in for the author. I might be off base, but it is also consistent with his real life reactionary turn.
It isn't just one man's perspective, but that of all of messy humankind. You are analyzing what needs to be metabolized. Bellows is encourging us to get out of our heads and into our guts.
I think being able to distinguish between satire/critique and genuine racism is important when engaging with a novel in which Black people are depicted as barbaric lazy criminals. Otherwise, the 'woke' critique that we shouldn't even read the satire begins to make sense.
I do not think 'barbaric lazy criminal' is an accurate way of describing the pickpocket character. However, Bellow works to bring everyone, including Sammler, down to the basest, least rational versions of themselves. This is the point of the book.
Do you honestly believe that Black people don’t understand and practice racism? Again, you are rationalizing this beyond Bellows’ intentions.
I don't know what you mean by Black people practicing racism
I think you're making the classic mistake of identifying a narrator with the author
In a way, Bellow saved my life. I was divorced, broke and broken. I took a copy of something huge and complicated back behind the house and started reading it. I can't tell you which one because it was forty years ago, but the book had a green cover and dense, meaningful, captivating prose that spoke directly to me and said enough that I understood I was not unique and there was more that life had to offer for me. Bellow, unique, fantastic and valuable. He was a treasure and the world will not see his like again.
Amen.
Wow, it's like you're in my brain. Just this morning, I re-read A Silver Dish. Yesterday, I started reading Augie March. The only one of Bellow's novels I've read is Herzog, but I can already feel myself growing obsessed with him and his prose. Loved your thoughts about Bellow as a mystic--it gives me a new lens through which to read him!
Love silver dish. Happy reading!
To quote from Humboldt’s Gift: “Poet, thinker, problem drinker, pill-taker, man of genius, manic depressive, intricate schemer,
success story, he once wrote poems of great wit and beauty, but what had he done lately?”
I've read everything and go back to Saul again and again--and long ago decided he was a genius--despite the crazy life story. I lived in Hyde Park, Chicago, for five years near where he did--and got an earful.
And then there's Epstein's horrendous essay about him; he even says that _Seize the Day_ is a terrible book???? Then he goes on about the wives. Then there's his son Adam's New York Times piece after his father's death.
But still the work stands for all the reasons you say. I could go on, but you've covered the brilliance so well!
It's interesting that "Ravelstein" was the book that hooked you at the beginning. It contains some of the most indelible "Bellow Mysticus" moments, similar to the bit you quoted from "Humboldt's Gift."
First, there's the remarkable two pages starting on p. 82 of my Penguin edition; this mini-essay begins "That I was hard on myself, Ravelstein took..." This is one of the best pieces of writing describing pure experience of the world without any preconceptions, through the eyes of a child, that I have yet come across.
Second, there are the hallucinatory descriptions of Chick's illness after he eats the poisoned fish. This part complements the earlier part, because here Chick (who is obviously Bellow; the book is very autobiographical) is experiencing reality not as a child but as an old man, and through the haze of illness. But the sense of bumping up against natural phenomena unmediated is similarly strong.
i see Saul, I click like
Thanks so much for this wonderful and timely review of Bellow’s work. I keep hearing from once well read friends and most educated people I meet that they don’t read short stories. So many readers declare with some pride that they read only non-fiction, as if they’re on a higher cultural
level. But sorry to say I am beginning to understand because I keep reading tons of literary magazines and even The Best Short Stories of whatever year, and I finish feeling frustrated. Only a handful hold a structure, a coherent thought, some vibrant writing and consequently something to learn. What you show is a writer observing people, having deep refections on life, politics human nature. So I just checked out his collection of short stories and just the preface by his wife and the introduction offer a vibrant writer worth reading and learning from. And for flaws well…I can forgive…
Thank you!!!
I'm a lifelong reader and Saul Bellow has been and always will be one of my favorites. From Herzog to Henderson the Rain King to Humboldt's Gift there isn't a post-war American novelist who even approaches his greatness. Roth is dazzling but ultimately boring, Updike a water spider whose prose skims quickly by, only to be forgotten, Pynchon unreadable.
Nice work, thorough, thoughtful, and entertaining at the same time...
Well, good try, but honestly, MR. SAMMLER'S PLANET is indefensible and Bellow himself had a genuinely rotten character and I have some inside skinny on that. RAVELSTEIN is a terrible betrayal of Allan Bloom, whom Bellow pretended to be a friend and admirer of. I know everything is copy, but please. I'll sign on for HERZOG, a great deal of HUMBOLDT'S GIFT and, of course, SEIZE THE DAY, and I recognize and honor AUGIE MARCH'S very important place in the larger scheme of Am Lit. The late stuff seems to me to be preaching to the Committee on Social Thoughts choir, and I have never gotten what HENDERSON THE RAIN KING is actually about.
In no way am I writing Bellow off, but you have to take a whole lot of rough with the smoooth with him, and I can't quite shake my feeling that the ideas in his books are really so much decor.
Happy New Year!
Hi Gerald. Thanks for subscribing. There is a lot of truth in what you say, of course. His son Greg Bellow’s memoir was very enlightening on this: Young Bellow being left-liberal and sweeter like Augie, and Old Bellow becoming conservative and religious and harder like Sammler. (The two never got along once they were both older, right up until Bellow died.) No matter what backroom skinny you may have personally, I do think the news of Bellow’s poor character is out there, in two extensive biographies—but the point is that I do not see how this should effect how we appreciate his genius and his work.
As for Henderson, it’s about a rich guy who goes to Africa. And about a mid life crisis. And, mostly, it’s about making fun of goys.
Why would Sammler be indefensible? It’s a brilliant book. Because of one scene? Pardon the cliché, but if we’re dumping novels because of a scene say goodbye to Dickens, Dostoevsky, Burroughs and a thousand others.
And is it anymore indefensible than the work of Celine or Yeats, actual fascists? Mailer, Pound? The sentiments in Bellow’s books arise from the heart of a complicated, imperfect, perhaps indecent guy, but for that matter so does the work of Hemingway and Byron. I’m sure Bellow and I wouldn’t get along were we to have a political debate, but the point is that I don’t care. Virtually every great writer reveals uncouth things about themselves and people from their lives—Hemingway measuring an insecure Fitzgerald’s dick in A Movable Feast comes to mind—but as the man said “When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished” (Milosz, quoted by Philip Roth—yet another in our pantheon of American assholes). Meaning: that writer buddy of yours is going to use your grist for his mill. No way around this. And same as it ever was. Bloom (also a huge asshole btw) *wanted* Bellow to write about him. I have to think he was smart enough to know what he was getting into.
I read or heard elsewhere that you are not a Bellovian, and that’s fine, no need to say otherwise. One thing you might like to know though is that regarding Seize the Day, Bellow in interviews said he, in fact, identified himself more with the cruel father Dr. Adler. We readers see it as a paean to the struggles of the Tommy Wilhelms of the world, but that was not actually what the book was about (in Bellow’s view). This was always who he was, kind of a hard ass, because it was where he came from. Yet, much being up to the interpreting reader, I simply don’t see how it matters what Bellow thought he was writing. The novel speaks for itself.
I don’t have to tell you that writers are mixed up, often ugly, complicated people, and their public life gives us the luxury of being able to judge them. My move in this respect is to forget this, and judge them purely by their work—whether they’re perfect, or even terrible, people is really none of my concern. The ancients—all our pre-mass media writers and artists in fact—bask in a partially obfuscating bath of anonymity; our contemporary chumps, since the at least the 1950s, have their whole asses out for all to see. James Joyce said he never met a boor. I’ve never met someone without significant sin. The more they claim otherwise, the more they've sinned, in my experience.
As a reader I like good work. I could give a damn whether he was good to his friends, his postman or his cat.
Happy New Year! You’re one of my favorites by the way, and I would defend you even if it came out that you shot someone and mugged elderly women. That’s just the kind of art-fiend I am. All best, TD.
I loved this essay even where I bristled at some claims -- I'm happy enough to let a writer have politics that aren't easily discernable, which is different than a writer not having his politics. What I loved most here, though, was the indictment of Millenial tastes which I think weren't totally up to us and weren't totally our own fault. That pre-9/11 era of outrageous, naive consumption taught the whole cohort that all cultural artifacts are, like products, entertainments and always entertainments of equal validity (DFW gave me some of that language).
A very important person to me showed me Bellow and she set me on a path we couldn't have predicted, but even that was the result of early internet "if you like this you'll like..." commentary on who knows what primitive service. At the time, I was playing snowboarding games and first person shooters on a Nintendo 64, watching Eraserhead because it was the oddest tape at the local video store-- and a movie called Stageghost about a haunted stage coach, in which you could see the porta potty the crew was using in many scenes-- listening to "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" on the bus to school where slamming an X across your groin with your arms indicated you were down with NWO pro-wrestling. Friends were starting to get into Harry Potter, which I'm happy never to have read.
The luck, serendipity, and magic it took for one to develop one's tastes were not widely distributed. I make no claims for myself as a person with critical insight or intelligence, but often feel as if folks have been made simple by a simple culture, and not least because of this medium on which the conversation is being had. I mean, I see many Millenial adults wearing backpacks with pins and patches and wearing non-ironic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirts, joining D&D groups... All I ever wanted when I was young was to grow up. I'm still working on it, and Bellow has been a great help. This essay has helped me think through why that is.
Thank you for appreciating this giant of a writer! I just got a couple of copies of the Library of America Saul Bellow series that includes Augie March and Sammlers Planet.
So we're clear--except for the very few exceptions mentioned here, aughts fiction was BAD? Categorically? Uh huh. Sorry, but the Woods moniker has aged poorly enough that he had to partially clarify it (and gee, how well do categorical denunciations of periods of art tend to age?). I generally despise Post-Modernism--at least the bulk versions of it--yet still found that round-up startlingly casual. But I'll be sure to let Franzen, Smith, DeLillo and Pynchon know you don't approve.
Fortunately, I also didn't need to read all of that to appreciate Herzog.
Herzog was great. And I loved Franzen's books, most of what I read.
Bellow is incredible. The political angle is just ridiculous, worrying about what an author's politics were/are. DFW was also a Republican. Camus and Sartre were communists, though Sartre clung onto full-on Stalinism and as a result Camus broke with him. Etc. Writers are complex people, as all artists are. We have to separate the art from the artist, and/or simply not care. Normal Mailer stabbed his wife in 1961, but I still LOVE Mailer. I don't aspire to BE these people, and I don't condone their personal behavior as human beings. But their writing is profound. People are people are people.
Here's a piece I did a while back on Bellow: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/saul-bellow
For sheer reading pleasure, his sentences are a delight. He makes periphrasis seem indispensable to any serious work of literature. He may lose the reader occasionally in the maze of ideas, arcane language and tortured sensibilities but the joy of interpreting and achieving even a proximate understanding of his intention if not his entire meaning is unequalled by other writing. Whenever his moronic inferno singes my white beard, I reread one of his novels to extinguish my despair of modernity.