Herzog

This was my first Saul Bellow book. I tried others many years ago, and always bogged down, but once I got through the first forty pages of Herzog, I was hooked. Being older was helpful - Herzog's erudition and neurosis weren't too threatening - and the distance of 40 years provided enough historical baffling to make me uncritical about whether Saul was riding the zeitgeist or not. I found Moses Herzog endearing and inspiring, although I'm not sure I'd want to spend much time with him or to be his friend. The tension between his philosophical knowledge and his personal cluelessness was amusing, not just because his wisdom didn't save him but because his willingness to focus on the personal was redemptive. There is great value in simply thinking, in letting your mind become caught up in abstract systems, in testing overarching concepts of meaning in the sexual-emotional furnace. Herzog is full of questions, doubts, prejudices, and failure, but he doesn't let that prevent him from growing into a better flawed person. The smug confidence of his many antagonists, whether his ex-wife, her lover, his psychiatrist, or any of his other comforters, makes Job seem blessed with good friends; Herzog's insecurity and his unfinished personality-in-process emerge as virtues in a world of assured monsters. Finally, he is trying to be a good man, to open his heart, to use his bourgeois suffering to become more loving. He is so successful that his goodness even overlaps his narrow self and extends to some of his compatriots and enemies. The reader is left pondering the mysterious dynamics of the human family and the unpredictability of the individual heart, stretched out on a couch like Herzog, thinking about life with rue and hope. In the days since reading Bellow's novel, I've become increasingly fond of his protagonist and his story. I feel like someone who looks back on a weekend with an old friend in the Berkshires with a glow of happiness and a sigh of relief.

I was prompted to write this because most of the reviewers published here miss the plain fact that Herzog is extremely funny. Herzog writes letters. He writes manic, crazy, poignant, inspired letters to people both living and dead: to his friends, to his shrink, to his divorce lawyer, to the President of the United States, and to Heidegger, to Schrodinger, to Nietzche and to Willie Sutton. It is, of course, one of Saul Bellow's best novels, written at the height of his carrer, which would place it somewhere on the list of the Top 10 or 20 best American novels of the 20th century. Herzog is worth both reading and re-reading, but the book is clearly not for everyone. It is as personal, realistic, and autobiographical as The Adventures of Augie March, but it is significantly more difficult to read in terms of both style and content. It is probably less accessible than Augie, the work of a maturer artist. Readers should expect neither a conventional plot or a chronological narrative, although the book is highly structured and is brought to a very satisfying and almost inspirational resolution as Herzog regains his equilibrium, which he loses to such comic effect in the early going.

Half way through this book. I shared some of the doubts expressed by other reviewers. Yes it is well written, but it appeared to be too narrow in its focus. A book whose sole topic is the protagonist's ego is hard to sustain for 340 pages. It cried out for social or political contexts into which the eccentric character could be absorbed. However all my early doubts were dealt with as the book progressed. His love for his daughter, brother and mother give Herzog greater depth and the reader starts to realise that Moses is not just a self-pitying, self obsessive. He is a man out of his depth , an intellectual in an anti-intellectual age. He is a Jew with a long family history of suffering, a "schooling in grief" yet even this proud history of struggle seems trivial because as Herzog notes: "What happened during the War abolished Father Herzog's claim to exceptional suffering". This is one of many aspects of personal history that troubles MosesThe early chapters lay the foundations for the wonderful latter parts of the book. Herzog is one of the most extraordinary literary creations of modern times. Bellow has created a multi-layered madman, pathetic yet loveable, a man of great intellect; solipsistic, moving, pedantic, gentle and above all believable. One moment he is plotting to murder the wife he loathes; the next he is showing the depth of his love for his daughter; then he writes to Nietszche telling the long dead philosopher that he is lying in a hammock in rural Massachusetts. He also writes to God, Heidegger, Eisenhower, ex-lovers and many of the personal and professional rivals he wishes to settle scores with. These letters (never posted), like the wife's one legged lover and Herzog's monkey kissing friend add much dark humour to what is often a very serious and moving narrative. This is a difficult, intense novel, but well worth the effort.

This is a great book--watch those changes from first to third person within the same paragraph! Check out Robert J. Lifton's "Protean Self" for a complete analysis of how Moses Herzog is the quintessential protean man. (Proteus was the Greek god who could change form to suit his circumstances.)