Artists and Opportunists in Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift"

Abstract

Easily the novelist most successful in capturing contemporary life's realistic and grotesque aspects has been Saul Bellow. Now past sixty, he has for more than three decades proved himself this country's most profoundly serious and exuberantly comic observer. If many writers today resort to impressionistic journalism and innovative fantasy, he retains a Tolstoyan appetitei for serious ideas. Indeed, ideas are Bellow's primary material, and usually they entangle themselves in his characters' perceptions and emotions. Despite his intellectual concerns, however, Bellow is basically a storyteller, and one who remains in the major tradition of conscious realism, with its intense characterizations and detailed, textured descriptions of its heroes' every physical and mental action. He has been described as having emerged from an ancient Jewish tradition of alarm wedded to responsibility.2 His social concepts and interpretations bear this out. His fiction derives much of its strength from his grasp of the cultural implications of his characters' behavior and emotions. His central Jewish loners and