Herzog by Saul Bellow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"[...] he wasn't stable enough, he could never keep his mind at it. His state was too strange, this mixture of clairvoyance and spleen, esprit de l'escalier, noble inspirations, poetry and nonsense, ideas, hyperesthesia - wandering about like this, hearing forceful but indefinite music within, seeing things, violet fringes about the clearest objects."

I have finally read Saul Bellow's Herzog (1961-1964), one of the most acclaimed novels written in this country in the 20th century. A very difficult book to read but fully worthwhile the effort. I would venture a guess that of all fiction books I have ever read in my life this one may have the highest amount of content per page. I had to focus almost as much as if I were reading a math textbook. It took me a whole week to read the mere 340 pages and - at the end - I was sad that it was over.

Herzog is thoroughly un-American: it is mainly about human failure. Failure as an academic, failure as a spouse, failure as a father. Failure and its consequences in the form of a near nervous breakdown and depression. Failure is the most interesting of all possible topics in literature: we all fail, constantly, continually, and inevitably as we tend to always want more than we can get. A mathematician/computer programmer in me would say: failure is the human default while success is a random event. Mr. Bellow puts it succinctly in one of the greatest sentences I have ever read:

"Looking for happiness - ought to be prepared for bad results."

Moses E. Herzog, a once promising assistant professor of history of literature, author of an outstanding PhD thesis and an unfinished book on the history of Romanticism, now teaches in an adult-education night school in New York. He is twice divorced and his second wife, Madeleine, an aspiring academician herself, cheated on him with his best friend. Mr. Herzog does not have much contact with his two young children. Struggling with his emotional and intellectual crisis he seeks help of a psychiatrist. He also seeks contact with women to satisfy his sexual needs but having been burned by two failed long-time relationships he is unable of emotional engagement.

Characters in the novel are superbly portrayed - those are real, full-bloodied people. Characterization of Madeleine, "a highbrow broad", is an absolute masterpiece. I am totally convinced I personally know her and I feel I have personally witnessed her predatory, manipulative, and egotistic behavior. By the way, it would be so cool to read a novel written from her point of view, all about Herzog's faults.

Herzog is technically a novel but there is really no plot to speak of until the ending of the book when a few events begin to happen. This is another reason of my sadness at the ending fragments of the book - I have found reading the ravings of a defeated intellectual much more interesting than his life story. Juxtaposing Hegel's or Kierkegaard's philosophical arguments with Madeleine's caprices and misdeeds is absolutely priceless. The narrator's letters to philosophers, scientists, writers, public officials, (some dead like Nietzsche, Schrodinger, or Teilhard deChardin, some contemporary like Eisenhower), his colleagues, friends and adversaries, constitute a substantial portion of the text. These are wonderful letters - Mr. Herzog is a wonderful writer, just a failed one. Having myself been an aspiring intellectual and having failed at it I can vouch to the truthfulness of the following quote:

"Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick."

I love the literary device of mixing the first- and third-person narration, similar as in another masterpiece The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B . This simple device yields wonderful effect: it makes the novel sound not like a story of one particular person but rather the story of the times.

Based on what I have written above one might think that Herzog is a relentlessly dark and grim read. Absolutely not! It is in fact (painfully) funny in many places. Observing a human being thrashing about searching for happiness has a strong comic component. We suffer, we struggle, we fail, and then we die. Yet there is good news, sort of. Mr. Bellow writes:

"Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is."

Wonderful! The emergence of a plot at the end of the novel prevents me from assigning the maximum numeric rating but I would have to be insane not to round it up.

Four-and-a-half stars.

View all my reviews