Herzog

The next book along my shelf was one I had read some time ago. It had kept its place because on a first reading I felt I had not fully come to grips with it. I had found it intellectually challenging, because of the way it is written. It takes the form of a narrative story, interrupted by the thoughts of the protagonist (Herzog), expressed in self penned letters, which questioned the state of the world and his place in it. I remember finding the letters an interruption of the narrative flow that required a different mind-set to fully appreciate them. The letters, or in some cases parts, or fragments of letters are integral to the text, but are made distinctive by being type set in italics. I found the reading experience exactly the same show more this time around, and was tempted to gloss over parts of the longer letters.

Moses Elkanah Herzog is a forty something jewish male who is undergoing a mid life crisis. He is an academic, currently not employed, living alone in a large remote house in the countryside. He seems to be at war with the world at large and in particular with his ex-second wife Madeleine who has turned him out of their conjugal home and is living with his best friend. He is spending his time thinking of his past and how he has arrived in his current situation. Part of this process, which maybe a healing process, is writing letters to people from his past and also to fellow academics and politicians: the letters remain unsent. Moses would appear to have many things in his favour: although not a rich man, his two brothers are both rich and supportive, he has made his mark in the world of academic publications, he owns the house in the countryside that he has renovated himself; he is fit and in good health and is attractive to the opposite sex. The narrative finds him travelling to see two of his female admirers and also to have time with his young daughter Junie who lives with Madeleine and Gersbach her lover.

Herzog wallows in self pity, perhaps brought on by paranoia, but also by writers block. The most important person in the world; Herzog's world is Herzog himself and he is judgemental on all of the people around him especially the women. He claims that Madeleine finds him over-bearing, infantile, demanding, sardonic and a psychosomatic bully and by his own story there is plenty of evidence of all of this. He repeatedly refers to Madeleine as that bitch and while her actions have given him cause for grievance one wonders how much of this he has brought on himself. In mitigation he fills in the background of the struggles of his poor ancestors and his relationships with friends and other women as well as the state of the world that he finds oppressive. He asses himself at the start of the novel and finds his characteristics: narcissistic, masochistic, anachronistic and his clinical picture is depressive, but there are worse cripples around:

"Satisfied with his own severity, positively enjoying the hardness and factual rigour of his judgement, he lay on his sofa, his arms rising behind him, his legs extended without aim."

Herzog's relationships with women form the central core of the novel. There is much about his marriage to Madeleine for whom he has not a good word, apart from the fact that she is drop dead gorgeous. There is Sono the Japanese lady who he was seeing when he met Madeleine. There is Wanda with whom he had an affair and now there is Ramona. The egotistical Herzog sees relationships with women as a battle of the sexes and carnal relations are apparently the major reasons to get involved. He thinks:

"The man wants to deceive, and then to disengage himself: the woman's strategy is to disarm and detain him."

While one might be hard pressed to accuse Herzog of misogyny, one would certainly say he shows a lack of respect for the women in his life, only asking himself what they can do for him. The fact that they seem to do a lot for him is duly recorded, but they are never allowed to get too close.

Herzog in an attempt to get custody of his daughter Junie visits the Magistrates courts where he sits in the public gallery and witnesses a couple of trials, a small time crook immersed in poverty and then a nineteen year old mother accused of battering her daughter to death because she made too much noise. Leaving the court he visits his family residence and takes a gun from his fathers office with a vague idea of getting even with Madeleine and Gersbach, but following a traffic offence he finds himself in a Chicago police precinct and after his second brush with lives outside of his own, he takes himself back to his house in the Countryside. He settles down again and sets about making the house liveable, he stops writing his letters, he is visited by a concerned brother and Ramona, but underlying a Hollywood ending is that Herzog is still Herzog.

Back to the letters: an integral part of this novel and woven into the narrative with great skill. They are thought provoking, many of them are witty, certainly cheeky and occasionally angry, but they remain a problem for this reader. While they provide a background to Herzog's thoughts by providing context for the early 1960's and the fears of many people such as: increasing violence, annihilation as a result of the atomic age and governments threatening the freedom of the individual, they tend not to have a direct relevance to the story: they tend to intrude. I found the best solution for me was to go back and re-read the longer letters, when I had finished the narrative. They are in themselves something of a tour de force, but they can be a fault line.

Herzog is an original novel, but it is also a novel of its time. It would seem to have an autobiographical feel to it: Herzog is Bellow and while I can sympathise with academic jewish angst and vouch for many of the attitudes of males from the battles between the sexes at the time: I am not jewish, I am not an academic and not all the women in my life have been so stunningly attractive as described in Bellows book, I am therefore still keeping my distance from a novel that does not completely work for me and so 4 stars. show less

And here we are again. Another Saul Bellow novel completed and at least, this time, I can (kind of) see the appeal.

Whereas I read The Adventures of Augie March with a growing disappointment in its precociousness (both linguistic and ideological) and Dickensian weight, here I read Herzog with an, quite to the contrary, appreciation for its quirks and peccadilloes as a novel.

Now, please understand, this 'novel' is a mess, an absolute mess. It's in fact only barely a novel. But, please, let me reiterate, THIS NOVEL IS AN ABSOLUTE MESS. In some respects this 'mess' actually contributes to the book's appeal. Characters don't speak like characters rather they speak as representatives for whatever ideas Bellow decides need debating. Again, in show more the vein of Dostoyevsky. Though Bellow inserts more than his share of biblical Hebrew and Yiddish within all this ‘anglo-European’ knowledge to let us know (at times to the point of maddening) that this is a Jewish author's author. And unlike Augie March, Bellow has shown maturation as a writer in greater ability to synthesize all his disparate influences into something resembling a coherent whole.

That's the charming aspect of the mess, now for the rest. Bellow is pretentious, more than that he's a complete elitist and snob. This shines through nearly every aspect of this novel's themes, characters, and presentation. How many actual people can do as the titular Herzog can do and work through their existential angst and marital woes while, as another reviewer put it, bumming around Europe on someone else's dime? Not many. And while I understand that escapism is inherent to certain kinds of fiction here it just reads as one writer's 'let them eat cake' mentality. Possibly Bellow thought that the weight of the ideas he was positing in his story would subsume the more pretentious aspects of his story or maybe he didn't give a damn (much of this is reflective of what Bellow himself went through at one point in his own life though as with much else, Bellow was dismissive of this kind of reading).

But I gave this story a four out of five and I mean it when I say that I enjoyed this book. It's bulky and uneven, and the elitism and intellectual narcissism can be off-putting to the point of suffocation but all of this becomes irrelevant or at least tolerable when you let yourself be taken away by the greatest aspect of Saul Bellow's writing and that is the joy of it. Much like what I read in his Selected Short Stories and even in stretches of Augie March, Bellow is at his best when the infectious joy and enthusiasm of writing and language and ideas takes him and, by extension, his readers up and away from the banal inanities of everyday life and per moment thought.

Is it a slog and a struggle? Yes. But in all honesty there's not much else like it that I've found in the canon so far. show less

Cracked up by divorce and disillusionment, Moses E. Herzog writes letters to the living and the dead, arguing with them about how to live decently, despite the fractures of the modern world. Bellow is, as ever, the inimitable stylist, and through every sentence, Herzog appears with a wild intensity. But am I ever supposed to trust his revelations? An edge of irony pierces the novel. Whether it pieces all the way through, each reader must decide.

I think that "Herzog" is a fine novel, but I also think that it's a tough book to love, or even to like. I imagine that there are a lot of readers who aren't going to be too interested in exploring the myriad neuroses of a depressed, self-involved nearly broke middle-aged Jewish intellectual with two ex-wives. Herzog is a deeply flawed character, and there's a lot about him, like his abiding grudge against his second ex-wife and her new lover, which might not be redeemable. Also, the book lacks what most people would call a plot: we witness the main character walk around New York, take a trip to Martha's Vineyard, and drive around Chicago, but this one makes "Mrs. Dalloway" look tightly plotted and full of action. As he wanders, Herzog, show more reminisces, berates himself and others, considers the state of the modern world in knotty paragraphs peppered with five-dollar words, and writes a lot of letters he'll never send. The book even lacks much of an emotional arc. Baggy and formless as it sometimes seems, Bellow resists the urge to tie all of the strands of his character's life together too neatly in the novel's last pages, and I imagine that many readers will find this anticlimactic. "Herzog" is, by turns, boring, spellbinding, exacting and diffuse. It makes Phillip Roth look like beach reading.

Somehow, though, I think that Herzog is a very worthwhile book, perhaps even an essential book, though perhaps not for the reasons its author intended. Bellow is, first of all, a fantastic writer at the sentence level. This isn't to say that his writing is traditionally beautiful or lyrical: these adjectives often don't apply to his prose. But I think it's clear that he managed to develop an absolutely unmistakable voice. There is such a thing as a "Bellow sentence," and maybe saying that a writer's bent the language they work in into an uncontestably unique shape is the highest compliment that you can pay a writer. Not coincidentally, Bellow is also very, very good at what one might call the small stuff: tiny physical details, the often ignored rituals of everyday life, descriptions of buildings and clothes and skylines. It would be easy, I suppose, to call Herzog a pre-feminist troglodyte, and he certainly is a grouch, if a grouch who has certain grandly romantic tendencies. But sixty years or so after it was first written, the novel might be considered a perfectly preserved image of middle-class life in America in the middle years of the twentieth century. It's all extraordinarily vivid, and Bellow takes the same meticulous care in describing his character's attitudes and expectations as he does describing the minutia of his daily life. His intellectual digressions, too, might be taken by some readers to be the products of a disorganized, overeducated mind, and in some sense, they are. But I also think that Bellow took the time to bury this book's themes very deeply indeed. There is, underneath all of this verbiage, a genuine meditation about how, or if, one can remain human in an increasingly dangerous and pitiless modern world. Moses Herzog is full of personality quirks, and not all of these are exactly pleasant, but he is also a man of his era, an iconic character despite himself. "Herzog" might also be considered as a series of expertly rendered brief interviews with hideous people: during the few days whose events are described here, Herzog spends time with many of the individuals who are most important to him. We meet his stepmother, his brother, some of his friends, his lawyer. Some of these scenes are amusing and others are sad, but, reading them, you might easily come to the conclusion that Bellow's got "it," the gift of making fiction seem real and human. Even as one recognizes many of these characters as Jewish-American "types," one emerges from the book feeling that one has actually met them. That's a rare talent, and one that can't be learned in writing workshops. And maybe that's the best reason to read "Herzog," it proves, as D.H. Lawrence did, that the products of literary genius aren't always neat or admirable. Challenging and often frustrating, but also recommendable. show less

A Jewish intellectual rages in unsent letters at the shortcomings of his acquaintances and his peers as a method of remaining calm and sane during his brutal second divorce. I wasn’t always enraptured with the novel, for what I thought was going to be a metafictional deconstruction of the modern world turned out instead to be a realistic psychological novel. But I only got mildly irritated in places, never truly vexed, for the details churning in poor Herzog’s mind were colorful and fascinating. I enjoyed them in a voyeuristic manner, for I always suspect that Bellow, like Roth, was drawing on his own disastrous experiences with women. If nothing else, I made me feel smug with how I have lived my life.

Malcolm Hillgartner adapted his show more booming American voice to a variety of female, Jewish, and even African American accents well enough to be believable without being stereotypical. show less

Fifty years on, it's probably time to take the blinkers off and start seeing this as a book that should be flung aside with great force. I do still have a little niggling doubt: Bellow was clearly someone who could write when he wanted to. It's a novel that puts big ideas across in clever, subtle ways, and it contains some passages where the writing is extremely beautiful.

But 90% of it is utterly unappealing. It's presented from the point of view of a protagonist I just couldn't find any sympathy with. You would probably have to be a male, heterosexual intellectual really to appreciate it, preferably an unreconstructed 1960s type that's never heard of the women's movement. Herzog is supposed to be someone the reader engages with, but show more in the end he just acts like all the middle-class divorced dads I know, falling to pieces until a new girlfriend conveniently turns up to look after him.

I wonder if anyone's thought of rewriting the story from Madeleine's point of view? show less

This witty novel by such an erudite writer as Bellow does show its age now, sixty years on. Herzog exhibits too much self-pity, lays too much emphasis on philosophising, falls over himself finding solace with the next best woman, and is laughably simple and immature as a parent. The plot starts to plod eventually and this is ufortunate because so much more could be made of the personage, Herzog. Rather, the reader must wade through indulgent philosophical prating at almost every turn, so much so that a hefty kick in the arse cries out as Herzog's best cure for his quite unsympathetic woes. Pity indeed, because Bellow wrote some good stuff.