Details
Synopsis
Professor Benn Crader, an esteemed botanist, has been living a rarefied intellectual life. Then he marries a sublimely beautiful woman whose gorgeousness conceals a deeply avaricious nature: she and her family are plotting to involve him in a multimillion-dollar blackmail scheme. Crader's nephew Kenneth Trachtenberg narrates this story of disillusionment, as a man who believes ardently in the transforming power of love finds himself entrenched in a disaster. The book's title comes from one of Trachtenberg's anecdotes about his uncle Benn: when he was asked about the dangers of radiation, Crader said, ''It's terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak." As in so many of Saul Bellow's novels, this one reflects on the nature of happiness, on the mind-body dichotomy, and on what it takes to survive with integrity intact in the deeply flawed society that America has become in the late 20th century.
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "Last year while he was passing through a crisis in his life my Uncle Benn (B. Crader, the well-known botanist) showed me a cartoon by Charles Addams."
Industry Reviews
"Crackles with intelligence and wit....Not only proof that Bellow can live up to his own standards; it is also a reminder of how diminished a thing postwar fiction would have been without him."
Del Negro
"It sparkles."
Stevenson
"Bellow's comedy is cunningly planned: we rollick, then we pause to think."
Stevenson
"One turns the last pages feeling that no image has been left unexplored by a mind not only at constant work but standing outside itself, mercilessly examining the workings, tracking the leading issues of our times and the composite man in an age of hybrids."
Del Negro
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