Fool’s Testament

Herzog
by Saul Bellow

This is literature, the work of a great novelist aiming for the stars, though perhaps not quite reaching them. In an age of constant bite-sized distractions from the internet and elsewhere, though, it’s hard to give this kind of writing the attention it deserves.

Stylistically exquisite, heart-tuggingly insightful, encyclopaedically informed, Herzog is largely a rendition of its protagonist’s internal monologue, sprinkled with a light salting of action and description. Moses Herzog conducts his compulsive monologue in the form of letters to others – friends, relatives, colleagues, fellow authors, publishers, contemporary politicians, etc. – which he invariably fails to complete and never mails. Not an easy read by any means.

Herzog is a high-flown incompetent, a former academic and historian who is in the throes of a nervous breakdown – a mild psychotic episode, you might call it. He suffers, he remembers, he writes his letters; he takes trips across the country for reasons he is not quite clear about himself, only to turn round and come back home. He has a bit of sex – the one thing he seems to be good at is attracting women – but he doesn’t seem to know how to make the women happy or let them make him happy. Eventually he returns to the place where his unhappiness began and is cured of his temporary insanity, although there is no promise that his apparently lifelong run of failure will end.

I experienced a curious sensation while reading this book – that of finding myself bored and impatient with Herzog and his endless, meandering, futile ruminations, yet eager to read on and find out what happens to him – and yet again being unable to hurry because the prose is so gorgeous and dense with flavour and nutrients. This queasy, ambiguous fascination is an effect that can only be achieved by a great author – an Updike or a Nabokov, or a Bellow.

At times, though, the book I was most reminded of was Portnoy’s Complaint, which is considerably more lowbrow (groin level, in fact, most of the time). Which raises an interesting question: since we already had Saul Bellow, was it really necessary to invent Philip Roth?