Mr. Sammler's Planet
by Saul Bellow
Summary
Artur Sammler is over seventy, tall, one eyed and Polish, a survivor in the exact sense: shot with his wife into a mass grave by the Einsatzgruppen, he climbed out from under the bodies, fought as a partisan, and now lives on the Upper West Side on the charity of his nephew Elya Gruner, reading Meister Eckhart and observing, as he puts it, the madness of the species. It is 1969, the moon landing is imminent, and New York, to Sammler's single eye, is conducting a carnival of liberation he has seen the other face of.
The novel is three days. A magnificent Black pickpocket Sammler has watched working the Riverside bus follows him home and, in the book's most notorious scene, corners him and exposes himself, an assertion of pure power Sammler receives like a communication from the age. A lecture at Columbia ends with a heckler shouting him down obscenely while the audience does nothing. His daughter Shula, mad in a gentle key, steals a Hindu scientist's manuscript about colonising the moon, entangling Sammler in a farce of restitution he conducts while the one person he loves, Elya, lies dying in a hospital of an aneurysm, tended by children too busy being modern to arrive.
It ends at Elya's deathbed with a prayer that is among the most argued over pages Bellow wrote: the terms of the contract, Sammler says, that each man knows in his heart.
Around three hundred pages, the angriest of Bellow's major novels.
Best for readers who want the sixties prosecuted by a witness with unanswerable credentials, and who will argue with the book as it argues with everything.
Historical Context & Significance
Mr. Sammler's Planet won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1971, completing Bellow's unmatched three, and it has been among his most contested major novels ever since it appeared. Admirers, Joyce Carol Oates among them, called its closing pages transformative; critics then and since have charged the book with dressing a reactionary tract in a survivor's authority, and the pickpocket scene in particular, a Black man reduced to a sexual signifier, sits at the centre of every case against Bellow on race. The argument is not settled and the novel is where it is conducted.
Philip Roth's summary remains the fairest: Sammler experiences the era's mores as the betrayal, by the crazy species, of the civilized ideal, and the book's power and its problem are the same thing, that it gives the prosecution's evidence to a man whose standing cannot be impeached.
Between Herzog before it and Humboldt's Gift after, it marks the point where Bellow's comedy curdled into judgment; the Nobel followed five years later.