Just Finished Reading Saul Bellow's Herzog

Until the past few years, I was very nearly completely out of the loop regarding contemporary and late-twentieth century American writers.  Besides Philip Roth, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, and John Irving, I was totally unfamiliar with Saul Bellow.  As a matter of fact, I only became aware of his name after hearing a song that independent/alternative musician Sufjan Stevens recorded about him on his 2007 The Avalanche album.  That's because Stevens was recording around the theme of the state of Illinois, and Bellow had lived in Chicago for a time. Well, I just got around to picking up a work of his, and with Herzog, it might have been his best, for all I know...

The early 1960s novel Herzog centers around the character of Moses Herzog, a middle-age Jewish professor and writer, specializing in the history of Romance literature, who is experiencing what we nowadays would term a mid-life crisis.  His second marriage has just ended in ruin, being kicked out of his home, and his wife taking on his former best friend while keeping custody over their young daughter.  His ongoing humiliation over this breakup is a theme throughout the story...but not the only one.  Herzog likes to write letters, and he composes them in his mind almost non-stop as he tries to figure out what direction his life has taken. His relations, professional associates, lawyers...anyone Herzog has dealt with in the past on a significant level gets the "letter" attention.  When he goes off in the story on one of these letters, the time sequence goes non-linear as Herzog relives his past through them.  Eventually he returns to the present, which in "real" time spans the novel in only a few days.  In the course of it all, though, Bellow establishes Herzog's world view, his past, and the relationships that he believes have led to his present plight.  He wonders whether he is ill, both physically and mentally.  His desire for revenge clouds his judgement and conflicts with his desire to keep contact with his daughter. He feels that he is falling apart...and then begins to see that this very nature that causes others to see him as disturbed is also that which is his strength in life...

Herzog is very deeply entrenched in the Jewish culture in urban America of that time.  I found reading about this interesting and also suspect that Saul Bellow put a lot of his own life into the story.  I had to read Herzog very carefully in order to avoid losing my way as Moses Herzog leaped from one mental letter-writing flight of fancy to another, often with little or no warning.  But now that I look back on it, that's kind of how I think, too...on one level I'm going about my own regular business during the day.  But on another level, I'm hopping and skipping around with my thoughts...although I'm not using the "letter-writing" device that Bellow so brilliantly employed to get into Herzog's mind...