Customer Reviews

The Dean's December (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

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Having only recently begun reading Bellow I have found him to be an admirable guide to the way contemporary man thinks about the world and particularly human relationships. Although the characters sometimes seem a little too involved in philosophical wool-gathering to be true, their ruminations provide critical insights into the way our society is constructed. In The Dean's December, the contrasts are between the decaying society of late communist Rumania and the problems of society in contemporary Chicago. The Dean is in Rumania to be with his dying mother-in-law, a formerly powerful party official who has been ostracised for allowing her daughter,an internationally famous astronomer, to emigrate to the west.. The Dean, who is a respected journalist has ruffled powerful feathers in Chicago with a series of pointed articles critical of certain aspects of Chicago society and has also been involved in seeking justice in a case where one of ! his students has been murdered. In this he is opposed by his radical nephew who thinks that the case is racist because the accused are African Americans of deprived social origins. Bellow is a master of setting the scene - the bleak December weather echoes the coldness of communist and capitalist society, the cheerless bureaucracies and intricate politics of both settings. As well as societies problems, the Dean must also confront his own mortality as he watches his beloved mother-in-law die and the reactions of his wife and slightly eccentric relatives to this stress. This is a book which will repay several readings. Highly recommended.

The downside of being pugnacious and feisty is that people stop taking you seriously next time you jump into a scrap. This seems to be what happened to this undeservedly neglected book by a great and feisty American writer.

Known for bringing artistic beauty, dimensionality, and a golden aura of wisdom to his tough Chicago turf, Bellow here took the gloves off. His University of Chicago Dean hero struggles with injustice and cynicism at its rawest, when he becomes engaged with the cavalier Chicago criminal justice system and its disgustingly casual response to the murder of a student. Counterpoint is meaningfully provided by the death of an old relative behind the iron curtain, whom the Dean visits. As in Lear, the subplot is no relief at all, merely stokes the flames of the main plot and brings Bellow's fury with the modern world to a white heat. Thus we are denied mere sociological or political excuses for our modern mayhem; the focus is what has gone wrong with our hearts the world over. Never has Bellow been more engaged or convincing. Indeed Bellow sacrifices something of his usual high gloss artistic finish to this product in the process, perhaps intentionally and savagely.

Yeah, he wants to stick it in your face and it shows. This is doubtless what offends some readers. Nevertheless it is a worthy response to having just received the Nobel Prize. Most writers, American and otherwise, react by self-inflating to sanctimoniously gracious gas bags. Saul knew who he was, however, and never let anyone fool him on that score.

I cannot recommend the real life portraiture and painting that shines through this text highly enough. It is entirely genuine, real, perfect, matchlessly true. I frankly know of no better Chicago novel.

To be fair, however, I must warn you that the 2 respected readers I know, who read this one cover to cover, were almost viscerally angry afterwards for having done so. Ultimately the experience only underscored to me the difficulties of succeeding in fiction, of making it that real.

Of course, there's no telling what the reception of a Nobel Prize can actually do to how a prizewinner relates to his work or material. Does he simply keep up the good work and satisfy himself with more of the same? Or does he feel compelled to stretch out a little, tackle tougher terrain, become a world spokesman, a kind of Bob Geldof of the academic world? Or does he simply pull up the stakes altogether and move to, say, Parnassus? While critics have expressed mild dissatisfaction with the post facto work of one of those Nobel winners, Saul Bellow, mainly because what some believe to be an unecessary discursiveness has crept into his later novels, Bellow's previous work is often so tongue-in-cheek and humorously numinous that it is easy to dismiss the dismissers as perhaps having read "The Dean's December" too superficially. Bellow's first novel after the Nobel watermark, in many ways, then, seems to betray the author's early attempts to keep up with the reputation he has gained: Big subjects, high blown philosophy, windy passages. But what else would you expect from Bellow, a man who hails from Chicago, the Windy City?

It's bleak and apocalyptic in the Romania where Albert Corde, a prominent Chicago university dean begins his story. The depths of an East European winter made even colder by the moribund Communist dictatorship whose presence is felt everywhere seems nearly as leaden as the sallow plum brandy he sips as if it were contraband in the decaying parlor of his wife's ailing mother, Valeria. As the old woman, once a favored Communist official, now a sweetheart of an aging underground of pale faces and flowery dresses, slips into the slow throes of an early death, Corde is emotionally consumed, not with the potent world into which he has been pulled, but with another one: Chicago, a city he seriously believes is in uproar over two scathing rants against its crime-ridden ghettoes he'd recently published in Harper's.

But, Bellow cunningly implies, such is the world of the American acadamy. A few cross words, perhaps bent towards the embarrassment of a number of pig-eyed public figures, and the next thing you know, you're a disgrace, a schmuck, a putz, the last guy anybody'd ever want to invite over for cocktails ever again. Not surprisingly, this queasy underbelly of the dissociative hyper-reality of America's upper classes is part of the price of our American comfort. It's a price of not really wanting to look, or of not quite knowing how, the cost of having willfully pulled away in both disgust and inadequacy from the often invisible reality of the downtrodden, tucked out of sight as they are in every major American city. Of course, the Romanian government has several quite neat solutions to the problems of public insolence. While Valeria's position as a political pentitent isn't beyond Corde's understanding, however, he seems beyond all that just the same.

The bottom line? Corde's protected public role as the Dean of the School of Journalism has done nothing to protect him. He's worried about his job. He sticks out like a burn victim in the faculty lounge. He's worried about who he is, who he might become. Worried most of all about what the papers are saying, especially in light of the fact he's also managed to have gotten both himself and the university ensnared in a legal fracas involving a pimp, a whore, a murdered college student and his quasi-Marxist nephew, Mason--a typically Bellowish twist as the sublime and the vulgar mingle and become the ludicrous.

Struggle as he might to find a way to meet the world in terms that actually make sense, Corde seems to know he's going to fail, and perhaps even become the embodiment of how out-of-touch public debate is from realities that are pressing in from every side. For him, poverty in a tenement, with its screaming, its dinge, its stench, its hopelessness and frustration are nothing but abstractions. While he might be in a position with enough influence to bring the bad news to the surface, still he's barely aware that the situation is as alien to his ways and means as it is astronomical.

Saul Bellow is famous for railing at Chicago. He's been grilled for it. And doubtless he has first-hand knowledge of how it feels to shake the dust out of the rug when company is in the room. Furthermore, as a literary icon, Bellow more than likely has an intimate understanding of how askew the academic and mundane worlds in America are from one another. Perhaps Bellow just can't help it. He's writing what he knows. And so what if a close examination of our vaunted intellectuals proves they're clowns?

This was my first (and thus far, only) Bellow novel, and I can't say I'm racing to pick up another. I had very high expectations, which were not met. Although passages of this book are quite beautiful and sensitive (most of which concern his wife and her dying mother) I was overwhelmed by how Bellow uses the main character as a megaphone through which to pontificate on contemporary race relations. He dramatizes nothing and leaves nothing for the reader to do. The setting, side by side, of a racially-inspired murder in Chicago and the death of an old woman in a communist country is certainly interesting, but way too subtle for me, especially in light of how heavy-handed Bellow is in other parts of the narrative. Still, I read this novel over two years ago and am still thinking of it; parts of it come back to me like a sepia-toned postcard, very fleeting.

I am a Bellow fan and have read most of his novels. After a while his books become like old friends. This is an excellent novel, but a bit slow and somber.

In case you are new to Bellow, his novels reflect his life, his writings, and his five marriages during his five active decades of writing. He hit his peak as a writer around the time of "Augie March" in 1953 and continued through to the Pulitzer novel "Humbolt's Gift" in 1973. He wrote from the early 1940s through to 2000. His novels are written in a narrative form, and the main character is a Jewish male, usually a writer but not always, and he is living in either in New York or Chicago. Bellow wrote approximately 13 novels and other works. The present novel - we can assume - reflects his own personal experiences of travelling to Romania in 1978, to attend the funeral of his mother-in-law, a former minister of health - similar to the story details of the book.

Bellow's style progressed a long way as a writer over the five decades. The early novels "Dangling Man" and "The Victim" were written 25 years before his peak. Those were heavy slow reads. "Dangling Man" is often boring, and Bellow was in search of his writing style in that period of the 1940s. Some compare his style in "Dangling Man" with Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground." Having read both I would say that "Notes" is brilliant while "Dangling Man" is at best average and sometimes a bit boring. The book is well written and compact and many like that first book, but it was never a big seller.

His style changes with time, and the novels became more colorful such as "Augie March" or "Henderson the Rain King," or in fact brilliant as in "Herzog" or expansive and entertaing such as in "Humbolt's Gift." In "Humbolt's Gift" the narrator Charlie Citrine, again a writer, tells us a bit about his philosophy of writing and the need to entertain. Some of these novels have a warmth and charm, and have a certain tongue in cheek approach in describing the trials and tribulations of the narrator. The humour is mixed in with the meaning of life and the future of our souls. Along the way there are a few diversions such as "Mr. Sammler's Planet" where we see a much more serious individual but again there is a bit of humour with the character Sammler.

That bring us to the present book, written by an older Bellow, one perhaps a step past his prime. But that did not stop Bellow nor does it detract in any way from the book. In fact, as we see in "Ravelstein" a few decades later, Bellow does not lose his touch, but the novels continue to change and evolve. The present book is serious, almost completely lacking in humour, and there are no side stories about former wives, or criminals, etc.

Without giving away the plot - such as it is and it is weak like most Bellow novels - the book has two parallel stories but perhaps just one complicated theme. The parallel stories involve the visit by the narrator, Dean Albert Corde, and his wife Minna to Bucharest to visit Minna's dying mother in an ICU in a Soviet style hospital. Corde is the Dean of Journalism at a fictional Chicago university. That sets a rather grim and humourless cold war era tone. In Bucharest he meets up with an old friend, and now a famous journalist, Dewey Splanger. Unknown to Corde, Dewey is preparing a piece to be published on Corde and on their upbringings in Chicago four decades earlier. The second of the two parallel stories is the life of Corde as a Dean and the subject of his writings and life in general in urban Chicago. These events all seem to come together and converge in Bucharest in a wintry December. The general theme is the way Corde views of urban Chicago; the theme reflects his writings on urban affairs, and the impact of the university on society.

The book is a bit slow to start, average in length about 300 pages long, but once underway is a complelling but not a brisk read. It does not have those Bellow touches that we see in some other novels. But still, it is Bellow, and as in other novels he makes literary tangent after tangent off of the main subject describing every character in great detail, and sometimes time shifting back many decades. He paints a stark contrast bewteen the grey communist Bucharest and the colorful and the complex Chicago, run by the political machine.

In a later book, "Ravelstein," Bellow uses Allan Bloom as a character and I thought that there were touches of Bloom in the Corde character, especially in setting the theme and how Corde viewed Chicago: "Bloom was a professor of social thought and a noted translator of Plato and Rousseau." Bloom became famous and wealthy following his book "The Closing of the American Mind", about American values and the role of Higher Education. Bellow and Bloom taught together and Bellow wrote the forward for Bloom's most famous book.

From a biographical description of Bloom I have copied this note: "Bloom blamed high technology, the sexual revolution, and the introduction of cultural diversity into the curriculum at the expense of the classics, which in turn produced students without wisdom or values. According to Bloom, American democracy has unwittingly played host to vulgarized continental ideas of nihilism and despair, and of relativism disguised as tolerance."

Some of those themes are present in the current novel, as Bellow describes the disillusionment of Corde with the crime and poverty of urban Chicago and the role in society of his own Chicago university.

This novel was a lot better than I had expected, but it lacks the warmth and charm of some of his other works.

Recommend. 5 stars.

After receiving the Nobel Prize in literature, Saul Bellow produced "Dean's December", another extraordinary masterpiece. Probably the most insightful of the wave of novels which appeared in the West after some of the writers managed to travel behind the Iron Curtain, this is the story of Albert Corde, the University Dean and journalist from Chicago, who travels with his Romanian wife, Minna, to Bucharest when Minna's mother, Valeria, is at the hospital in critical condition after a stroke.

Dean Corde, as an America in the Communist Romania (annoyingly called Rumania which I believe was common in English several decades ago, although incorrect), is protected by his wife's family, not advised to left the house by himself, and alienated by the language barrier, effectively being left alone, with scarce contacts with Minna's family (despite his strong feelings for them and his will to help). Staying alone in his wife's childhood room at Valeria's apartment, which is occupied also by an elderly aunt, Tanti Gigi, the Dean cannot even read books, being essentially a benevolent prisoner; so he immerses himself in thoughts, disturbing and worrying, his problems remaining unsolved and new problems appearing during this cold December. The professional matters, left in Chicago, mingle with the personal in Bucharest, and each has an element of another in it. Although the narrative is in the third person, it is clear that most of it is told from Albert's point of view and is, essentially, a stream of his thoughts, a monologue (with a phone conversation, a discussion with Minna, or some letters here and there).

Albert has left Chicago in the middle of being involved in the trial of the death of one of his students, where the two accused are a pair of black inhabitants of the city - a prostitute and a man whose actions are dubious, but who is a friend of Albert's nephew, Mason. Mason tries to convince Albert that his friend could not kill the student, and uses clever arguments, which - Albert admits to himself - are better than he is able to rebuke.
Because the Dean caused some stirrup with his articles (after all, he is not a true academic, as he reminds the reader quite often - he is a journalist) about the structure of the Chicago society, he feels he cannot count on the University authorities and feels a bit lost in the whole affair while he is in Romania.

In Bucharest, he tries to be helpful to his wife, who is not permitted to see her mother dying in the hospital for the privileged (as she was both a well-established doctor and married to one, in spite of her leaving the party and being condemned and then rehabilitated, but never fully accepted by the regime, she was allowed this last favor), and summons all the diplomatic help he can get - he negotiates with the Ambassador and meets his childhood friend, Dawey Spangler, now an acclaimed political journalists, who also promises to do anything for help.

Valerie's death on Christmas Eve provides an anti-climax, because it really does not provide relief, does not solve any of the trouble on either side, and although the Dean and Minna can return to Chicago, they are as disturbed as back in Romania.

The novel is a slow thought-provoking read, written in dense and intelligent prose. The Dean is another impersonation of Bellow's intellectual, expressing the author's thoughts. And I can see why Bellow likes so much this type of main character (maybe aside from being close to such people in reality?). An intellectual, an academic, is a good model protagonist whose philosophizing, and constant literary associations can be excused, and who gives in exchange a background of knowledge, insightful and perturbed mind, and idealistic attitude which can be used for the best presentation of the views the author wishes to show here. The story is a tale of two cities, very different - one a place under the oppression of the dictatorial Communist system, the other the American dream not without political and social trouble of its own. And the question, which immediately comes to mind: what makes people, the core of any society, better? The freedom, or at least apparent freedom, and material well being, or the lack of it all, forcing people to stick together and help each other in any possible way, and to appreciate even the smallest bits of cultural and economical normality.
In the other aspect, this novel, although clearly an attempt at objectivism from Albert's point of view, is a personal account, by definition not objective. Albert's perceptions and opinions are not ideal, his mental portraits of people, even the closest relatives, like Minna or his sister Elfrida, seem to be far from reality (he sees Minna, a professor of astronomy, as completely removed from the world, whereas she seems to be more down to earth than he is - maybe his view is blurred by love?), and his actions, although well intended and thought through, quite often miss the point.

"Dean's December" is a great novel, a treatise on universal matters and a record of a fragment of our history, valuable both to American and international readers, There is nothing shallow, trivial or negligible, and nothing that could be easily forgotten of become obsolete.

This is one of my least favorite Bellow novels. But because it is Bellow it has a lot worth reading in it. His thoughts about society and culture may not always be exactly on the mark, but they usually stimulate and inspire. In this novel the hero is a bit less sympathetic than many of his other main characters. Henderson, Herzog, Humboldt, Sammler , Augie March have vivacity and life that Dean Corde does not. The Dean's wife too falls short of Bellow's livelier and more appealing feminine creations, for instance the Ramona and Madelaine of Herzog. So too the whole spirit of the work has about it a pessimism and bleakness which contrast strongly with that of Augie March, and Henderson, and even in its way, Herzog. This book is really a winter book, and it has coldness and dying in it. And it has the oppression of the Communist Iron Curtain world in Romania, and the depression of Chicago's most beaten and desperate streets. The characters and the story seem less alive than the ideas.
Again this is not one of his best. Far from it. But it is Bellow and because of that a worthwhile read.

The Dean's December tells the story of Albert Corde, one of Bellow's memorably depicted intellectual characters, a Chicagoan of 'pullman car' gentility, a college dean and sometime journalist, who waits for a dying mother in law in chilly Romania, behind the Iron Curtain, and also for the result of a trial of two blacks accused of murdering a white student, A trial on which he has commented.

Corde is perfectly placed in his predicament for Bellow to explore the great themes that were brewing and swelling within his colossal mind at the time, some of them current and political, some of them the great eternal issues of life and existence. All are mixed in here. Corde reflects on the value of his intellectual life, surrounded by poverty and struggle in Romania, on the essence of virtue in ruthless capitalist societies where poetry and art are trampled by the one dimensional value axis of money versus poverty. Corde is a patrician intellectual, someone who escaped from the blocks fast in life, publishing an influential article on the Potsdame conference while still in his early twenties, but has stagnated along the way, in a similar manner to his precursor character Tommy Wilhelm in 'Sieze the Day'. Others, most notably the high flying political commentator Dewey Spengler have played the scales of life more practically, accepting society for what it is, eschewing old fashioned romanticism - their shared childhood reading of Shakespeare in Lincoln Park, and has played life as a political game. Corde, the philosopher, becomes trapped, and ponderous, much like Hamlet, and is denounced and outflanked by Spengler in a splendid denoument at the end of the novel.

Not all of the Dean's December is sublime. There are many passages displaying Bellow's worst fault - the pretentious, intellectual name dropping - Freud, Marx, existentialism, you name it, sprayed about the pages for show. But at its best, all Bellow's intellectual influenes combine to produce great mind grabs of paragraphs, astonishing stretches of prose that capture with great perceptive, aesthetic and stylish depth just what it is to be human. There is an incident at the beginning of the book (a famous incident, much commented on by the likes of Amis, McEwan and Rushdie) where a dog in Bucharest barks out against the limits of dog experience (for God's sake, open the universe a little more!). Bellow did just that. That is why he was so great.

The dialogue and endless introspection offered in this book gets tiresome quickly. Bellow's best work came before his Nobel Prize and this is an example of his weakening powers -- when his ideas outweighed action to create tedious novels.

Fascinating insight of a dark time in the Eastern European history- communist dictatorship seen first hand by an american