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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Extraordinary Achievement, October 18, 2000
Actually, this is two books combined and correlated within a singlevolume. The first is probably the best biography of Bellow we canexpect unless and until he agrees to work closely with someoneelse. In that event, I suspect, the results would not be of the samehigh quality because Bellow (consciously or unconsciously) wouldmanipulate the material and the presentation of it with an intellectand a willpower few other persons possess. The second is acomprehensive analysis of his canon and I think it isfirst-rate. Others far better qualified than I may challenge some ofthe various analyses but they certainly are sufficient to my needs. Irank Bellow among the greatest American novelists of anycentury. Frankly, I was astonished when reading Ravelstein to findthat in this immensely complicated work, Bellow seems to be inhis prime. How can that possibly be true at his age and after all thathe has personally experienced for so many decades? Long ago, Whitmansaid "I am large. I contain multitudes." The same can be said ofBellow. Whatever anyone may think of his personal life as it hasevolved through the years, through marriages and divorces, throughfriendships gained and lost, no one (at least anyone with anyintelligence and taste) can deny his stature as a literary artist ofthe very highest rank. I am deeply grateful to James Atlas for hissubstantial contributions to my understanding and appreciation ofBellow.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
First-rate Bio For the Selective Bellow Fan, November 16, 2001
By A Customer
I am a Bellow fan, and aware of the upset this book caused with some, but thought Atlas's critique was very often on the mark. Bellow's early, short, novels are tightly-written, well-constructed American classics of alieanation - Dangling Man, Seize the Day and The Victim, for example. But Atlas zeroes in on the problems of the later, longer books that too often make up the core of university teaching lists - these longer books start off brilliantly, then pad out with a hundred extra pages or so of name-dropping and bizarre philosophizing (some of which belongs in the Chariots of the Gods category), and I think Atlas is right when he says Bellow's early, impoverished immigrant background left him with a strong desire to show off intellectually later in life, to the detriment of his work. Perhaps in his early days Bellow was insecure in a different way, in the right way, not allowing himself any self-indulgence in his early work and thus pulling off the indisputable classics that Dangling Man, et al, are. This is a slightly odd biography in the sense that it will really, I think, most appeal to readers who pick and choose their fiction based more on the quality of the individual work, rather than those who have invested terms or years studying or teaching a particular author-personality - the most committed Bellow's fans will not like it, but those more detached will find this a very enjoyable and enlightening read. Newcomers to Bellow may wish to read a couple of his early, short books, before deciding if the later, more controversial novels, or this biography, are for them. I thought it a great read.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Richard Ellmann NOT, October 26, 2000
By A Customer
Many reviewers are comparing this pleasant but uninspiring biography to Richard Ellmann's masterful biography of James Joyce, which bugs me. There's no comparison. The Atlas book is competently written but lacks...I don't know, affect, sensibility, a complex and rewarding attitude toward its subject. Great biographies, whether by people like Boswell or by Ellmann, filter the data of someone's life through someone else's consciousness. It's not necessarily done overtly, but great biographers somehow convey a general moral, aesthetic, and even spiritual understanding and appraisal of their subjects. (There was a great biography of Eugene O'Neill that came out a few decades back that, like Boswell's and Ellmann's work, managed to achieve this.) I'm not talking about vulgar "pathographies" here, but rather accounts of brilliant lives that offer a comprehensive portrait of work and person, and that do not hestitate to condemn as well as praise. Atlas seems strangely repressed in regard to Bellow. Clearly he does not like him, and his dislike seems warranted; and yet he does not follow through on this dislike with a discussion of, say, the way in which many great artists are humanity-challenged precisely by virtue of the tendency toward detachment and emotional cannibalism, if you will, that constitutes their peculiar mode of being. The Atlas biography reads, to me, like a "first" biography of Bellow - one written in the midst of his unfinished life and work, and therefore tentative - without the dimension of tragic summation, for instance, that Ellmann's (written after Joyce's death) had. Bellow, as he's the first to admit, is a very curious character, one whose life has much to tell us about the loathing of and entrapment by modernity. He will ultimately (posthumously) have a biographer who tackles the themes of his life.
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