Well I agree with all the opinions expressed so far on Bellow - except Morty's! I've read or (admit it: part-read) six of his books, five novels and one collection of stories, and have never had much pleasure from them. The reason I read six of them is because of (a) people like Libre's friend whose opinions I respect and who insist he's great, and (b) qualities I can see in some of the pages and fully admire, even when I don't like the whole. Take this little description from
Henderson the Rain King, of the narrator playing his late father's violin:
I tightened the bow screw and scrubbed on the strings. Harsh cries awoke. It was like a feeling creature that had been neglected too long. Then I began to recall my old man. ... So I began to recall his bent back and the flatness or lameness of his hips, and his beard like a protest that gushed from his very soul - washed white by the trembling weak blood of old age. Powerful once, his whiskers lost their curl and were pushed back on his collarbone by the instrument while he sighted with the left eye along the fingerboard and his big hollow elbow came and went, and the fiddle trembled and cried.
Superb stuff. And there's a page-long passage from
Herzog (one of the ones, along with
Henderson, Seize the Day, and
Something to Remember Me By, that I did finish, without getting much enjoyment from) which is used as the epigraph to Ian McEwan's recent novel
Saturday, which is just wonderful - taken in isolation like that. I think the problem comes from the fact that it's not in isolation, it's compacted inside a mass of much much more of the same - too much, if you like, of a good thing. For my tastes prose needs a touch more air, more breathing space, than Bellow gives it, and so while I can
admire his writing, I find it very difficult to
like his books. Maybe when I'm older?
(The others, by the way, that I failed to finish, are
The Adventures of Augie March and
More Die of Heartbreak.)