After I finished “Herzog” last year, I thought it was easily one of the best books I’d read in 2012. This book, published almost a quarter of a century later in 1987, leaves much to be desired. It continues many of the themes that one would readily recognize as prominent in Bellow’s novels – the sordid private lives of intellectuals, especially their romantic relationships, mixed in with a heady dose of the ideas those intellectuals live and work in. The book mostly traces the lives of two of these intellectuals - Kenneth Trachtenberg, a Russian studies professor who has moved from Paris to the Midwest to be at his uncle’s university, and his uncle Benn Crader, the world-famous botanist (or as Bellow cheekily puts it, “plant mystic.”)
Benn, while he’s had a phenomenally successful career, is utterly clueless about his romantic life, and Kenneth mercilessly dissects his private failures throughout the novel, in a way that almost makes you question his supposed reverence for his uncle. He repeatedly brings up – not to Benn in conversation, but to the reading audience - a one-time sexual encounter that Benn had with an older, drunk neighbor to whom he claimed to not be attracted but slept with anyway. She is exasperated when he then seems uninterested in her romantic intentions. Later, he meets a woman named Caroline who is manages to be simultaneously aloof and overbearing. Later still, he meets Matilda who claims to want an older, intelligent man. Benn marries her without Kenneth’s knowledge.
Kenneth, not surprisingly, has romantic problems of his own. While Benn is planning a wedding to Caroline, he is visiting Treckie, with whom he has one child. He notices that since their breakup, she has begun living with man whose sexual aggression has bruised her legs – something that Kenneth always refused to do.
The real pitfall of the novel is where Bellow’s exploration of Matilda’s father’s shady business dealings. He purchased Benn’s mother’s house for pennies on the dollar, only to have him and his friends greatly profit from it. Too much of the novel is spent discussing how Matilda’s father plans to make things right by Benn by seeing that receives a lot of this money so Matilda can get the wealthy husband she deserves. I thought it prevented this rich, deep discussion of the complexities of human relationships from being even better. And as I got further into the book, it seemed like the side story of how Matilda’s father made his living by screwing over Benn’s mother and her children became more central, and because of that I became less interested.
I’m usually not one to run toward facile interpretations which read a novel as a barely veiled version of the author’s own life, but that resisting that temptation is particularly difficult here. One can easily see in Bellow the same capacious intellect and rapacity for the history of ideas that we see in Benn and Kenneth, and consequently perhaps, the same lack of social and sexual sangfroid. Bellow was married five times, and two of those marriages lasted for only about three years each.
Caroline, Treckie, and Matilda could easily be versions of Bellow’s real-life romantic attachments. But even if they were, his trenchant analysis of romantic human needs and desires doesn’t stop with them; he’s just as critical of the detached, cool attitudes of Benn and Kenneth. I don’t think this is one of Bellow’s masterpieces, as I would openly admit of “Herzog” (“Augie March” and “Humboldt’s Gift” seem equally important, though I’ve read neither) but if you have an affinity for Bellow’s writing, this may be of interest.
