Books, Arts & Manners: King Saul

It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future, by Saul Bellow (Viking, 327 pp., $23.95)

HE HAS been heaped with honors. Justifiably so. Now, at the age of 78, Saul Bellow is being circled by intellectual picadors, intent on lowering the old bull’s head, making him bleed. Alfred Kazin, writing in The New Yorker, has accused him of being a “university intellectual,” this child of the Depression and Marxism now moving in the company of “conservative Big Thinkers at the University of Chicago.” Hilton Kramer, pronouncing in Commentary, has adjudged him still one of “that dwindling remnant of homeless liberals,” his most recent work disappointing, as a consequence of his “acquiring the smug and apodictic tone of a writer whose celebrity was now a refuge from experience and a barrier to any direct engagement with the world.”

MR

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Mordecai Richler

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It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future, by Saul Bellow (Viking, 327 pp., $23.95)

HE HAS been heaped with honors. Justifiably so. Now, at the age of 78, Saul Bellow is being circled by intellectual picadors, intent on lowering the old bull’s head, making him bleed. Alfred Kazin, writing in The New Yorker, has accused him of being a “university intellectual,” this child of the Depression and Marxism now moving in the company of “conservative Big Thinkers at the University of Chicago.” Hilton Kramer, pronouncing in Commentary, has adjudged him still one of “that dwindling remnant of homeless liberals,” his most recent work disappointing, as a consequence of his “acquiring the smug and apodictic tone of a writer whose celebrity was now a refuge from experience and a barrier to any direct engagement with the world.”