Herzog
by Saul Bellow
Summary
Moses Herzog, forty seven, scholar of Romanticism, twice divorced, is coming apart in the most articulate way imaginable: he writes letters. Unsent, increasingly unhinged letters, to friends, enemies, dead philosophers, Eisenhower, Nietzsche, God, his dead mother, composed in his head and on scraps while his life burns, and Bellow threads them through the narration so the reader lives inside a first class mind using itself as an escape hatch.
The occasion for the breakdown is operatic. Herzog's second wife Madeleine, brilliant and ruthless, has ejected him from the Berkshire farmhouse he bankrupted himself restoring and installed his best friend, the one legged radio personality Valentine Gersbach, in his place, and the pair have his small daughter June. The novel's present is five days: New York and the warm, willing Ramona, whom Herzog flees precisely because she would make him happy; a courtroom where he watches a child abuse trial that strips his self pity of its comfort; and a flight to Chicago with his dead father's pistol and two bullets, one intention per bullet, which dissolves the instant he looks through a window and sees Gersbach, absurdly, tenderly, bathing June.
A crash, an arrest, and a return to the ruined farmhouse close it, with Herzog, for the first time, writing to no one.
Around three hundred and forty pages, dense with thought and completely alive.
Best for readers who want the novel of ideas with blood in it, and the century's best portrait of intelligence as a way of avoiding one's life.
Historical Context & Significance
Herzog won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1965, Bellow's second of three, and did something none of his books had done: it became an unlikely bestseller, a novel stuffed with Spinoza and Heidegger outselling every expectation, which became its own famous fact about the American reader.
The wound underneath was public knowledge by then: Bellow's second wife had left him for his close friend Jack Ludwig, and the novel transposes the betrayal nearly intact, distributing revenge with a thoroughness his biographers have catalogued. That the book turns private humiliation into comedy, and comedy into something like forgiveness, is exactly its achievement.
Time placed it on its list of the hundred best English language novels since 1923, and within Bellow's shelf it is the consensus summit, the book where the voice founded in Augie March acquired a subject equal to it. The Nobel citation's praise for the human understanding in his work is, in practice, praise for this novel first.