Mr. Sammler's Planet [Paperback]

The narrative is simple: a close third person point of view brings us inside Mr. Sammler's head as he interprets and analyzes the events in his life: his dying nephew, a pick pocket who assualts him, greedy relatives, a missing manuscript, and his Holocaust experience. There are long philosophic digressions, sometimes humorous, sometimes didactic, that can frustrate, confuse, and enlighten the reader, all within the space of a single paragraph. This density of thought is one of the supreme challenges of Bellow, but as an ardent fan (who only "gets" a mere fraction of what he's talking about), the payoff is exponentially greater than the effort I put in. The only narrative flaw I find is in the dialogue between Sammler and Dr. Lal. It's structured in a Platonic form--reminiscent of the final chapter in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--and the section seems forced and stilted compared to the rest of the novel.

Bellow's prose is as strong as ever. We return to New York City in the late 1960s, much filthier and more violent than the setting of Seize the Day. His descriptions of people and places are vibrant, and his comic timing masterful.

Ultimately, Mr. Sammler's climatic quest, like all of Bellow's protagonists, lies not in some external feat of physical valor but in a confrontation with the progtagonist's soul. Faced with the death of his nephew, Sammler must come to terms with his life as holocaust survivor, elitist intellectual, misogynist, and man.

Saul Bellow is not for everyone... But if you are introspective, self critical, and enjoy philosophic and comic writing, than this would be an ideal 2nd or 3rd Bellow novel.

Other reviewers have made the claim that looking for solely plot is superficial, and while I agree somewhat(but I also think this is their elitist way of intimidating those who didn't like the book into feeling uneducated and stupid), I agree only in the sense that great fiction should ideally have more than simple plot. But this book has almost no plot, nothing more than contrived situations in order to house the author's intelligent postulates. This is fiction, and story is what makes fiction thrum. If Bellow really wanted a context in which to pose these ideas, he should have just released a collection of essays, possibly interrupted with anecdotal short stories and brief allegories(I get that feeling reading most of his work.)