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Collected Stories
This is the definitive collection of short stories by Saul Bellow. Abundant, precise, various, rich and exuberant, the stories display the stylistic and emotional brilliance which characterises this master of prose. Some stories recount the events of a single day, some are contained in a wider frame; each story is a characteristic combination of observation and a celebration of humanity. This volume contains a preface by his wife, Janis Bellow, and an introduction by James Wood. It is an essential collection.
442 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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About the author
Saul Bellow
251 books1,953 followersNovels of Saul Bellow, Canadian-American writer, include
Dangling Man
in 1944 and
Humboldt's Gift
in 1975 and often concern an alienated individual within an indifferent society; he won the Nobel Prize of 1976 for literature.
People widely regard one most important Saul Bellow of the 20th century. Known for his rich prose, intellectual depth, and incisive character studies, Bellow explored themes of identity and the complexities of modern life with a distinct voice that fused philosophical insight and streetwise humor. Herzog , The Adventures of Augie March , and Mister Sammler’s Planet , his major works, earned critical acclaim and a lasting legacy.
Born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow at a young age moved with his family to Chicago, a city that shaped much worldview and a frequent backdrop in his fiction. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and later Northwestern, and his intellectual interests deeply informed him. Bellow briefly pursued graduate studies in anthropology, quickly turned, and first published.
Breakthrough of Saul Bellow came with The Adventures of Augie March , a sprawling, exuberance that in 1953 marked the national book award and a new direction in fiction. With energetic language and episodic structure, it introduced readers to a new kind of unapologetically intellectual yet deeply grounded hero in the realities of urban life. Over the following decades, Bellow produced a series of acclaimed that further cemented his reputation. In Herzog , considered his masterpiece in 1964, a psychological portrait of inner turmoil of a troubled academic unfolds through a series of unsent letters, while a semi-autobiographical reflection on art and fame gained the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1976, people awarded human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture of Saul Bellow. He only thrice gained the national book award for fiction and also received the medal of arts and the lifetime achievement of the library of Congress.
Beyond fiction, Saul Bellow, a passionate essayist, taught. He held academic positions at institutions, such as the University of Minnesota, Princeton, and Boston University, and people knew his sharp intellect and lively classroom presence. Despite his stature, Bellow cared about ordinary people and infused his work with humor, moral reflection, and a deep appreciation of contradictions of life.
People can see influence of Saul Bellow in the work of countless followers. His uniquely and universally resonant voice ably combined the comic, the profound, the intellectual, and the visceral. He continued into his later years to publish his final Ravelstein in 2000.
People continue to read work of Saul Bellow and to celebrate its wisdom, vitality, and fearless examination of humanity in a chaotic world.
People widely regard one most important Saul Bellow of the 20th century. Known for his rich prose, intellectual depth, and incisive character studies, Bellow explored themes of identity and the complexities of modern life with a distinct voice that fused philosophical insight and streetwise humor. Herzog , The Adventures of Augie March , and Mister Sammler’s Planet , his major works, earned critical acclaim and a lasting legacy.
Born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow at a young age moved with his family to Chicago, a city that shaped much worldview and a frequent backdrop in his fiction. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and later Northwestern, and his intellectual interests deeply informed him. Bellow briefly pursued graduate studies in anthropology, quickly turned, and first published.
Breakthrough of Saul Bellow came with The Adventures of Augie March , a sprawling, exuberance that in 1953 marked the national book award and a new direction in fiction. With energetic language and episodic structure, it introduced readers to a new kind of unapologetically intellectual yet deeply grounded hero in the realities of urban life. Over the following decades, Bellow produced a series of acclaimed that further cemented his reputation. In Herzog , considered his masterpiece in 1964, a psychological portrait of inner turmoil of a troubled academic unfolds through a series of unsent letters, while a semi-autobiographical reflection on art and fame gained the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1976, people awarded human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture of Saul Bellow. He only thrice gained the national book award for fiction and also received the medal of arts and the lifetime achievement of the library of Congress.
Beyond fiction, Saul Bellow, a passionate essayist, taught. He held academic positions at institutions, such as the University of Minnesota, Princeton, and Boston University, and people knew his sharp intellect and lively classroom presence. Despite his stature, Bellow cared about ordinary people and infused his work with humor, moral reflection, and a deep appreciation of contradictions of life.
People can see influence of Saul Bellow in the work of countless followers. His uniquely and universally resonant voice ably combined the comic, the profound, the intellectual, and the visceral. He continued into his later years to publish his final Ravelstein in 2000.
People continue to read work of Saul Bellow and to celebrate its wisdom, vitality, and fearless examination of humanity in a chaotic world.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 68 reviews
June 24, 2020
It is in the Afterword, at the end of more than four hundred pages of stylishly constructed prose, at times thick and often humorous, that we find Saul Bellow’s view on the length of a story. Remembering Miss Ferguson, his composition teacher sixty years back, while in high school in Chicago, who’s class moto was “Be specific!”, always pointing out to “stick to the necessary and avoid the superfluous”, Bellow admits, not without regret, that he did not follow the advice to the letter. So be it. In this superb collection of stories, the rarities are the short ones, like the opening By the Saint Lawrence where Rexter looks back at his life, remembering with a deep sense of nostalgia, long gone relatives. By constantly reminiscing about the past, Bellow places memory at the core of his writing.
Modern life in America is another of his recurring themes and it is linked almost naturally with family values and love. Like Bellow himself, some of his characters have been married more than once, and still ask themselves what went wrong. The question is almost always allegorical. At the end of A Theft a story from 1990, the scene takes place in the old Westbury hotel, on East 69th Street, the place where Fernando Rey in his enigmatic character of Alain Charnier chose to stay when in NYC in the French Connection, the 1971 thriller film directed by William Friedkin. That a one-hundred-page story finishes (and is cleverly resolved) in style at the bar of the legendary hotel defines in a classic way the formal design masterminded by Below. The neighborhood, known to Manhattanites simply as “The Upper East Side”, is home to one of the greatest concentrations of personal wealth in the world. And this of course defines the central character of the story, Clara Velde. As is customary with Bellow, or what I can define as standard procedure, the story opens with a simple but to the point description of her looks, that goes beyond the mere physical features:
Clara Velde, to begin with what was conspicuous about her, had short blond hair, fashionably cut, growing upon a head unusually big. In a person of an inert character a head of such size might have seemed a deformity; in Clara, because she had so much personal force, it came across as ruggedly handsome. She needed that head; a mind like hers demanded space. She was big-boned; her shoulders were not broad but high. Her blue eyes, exceptionally large, grew prominent when she brooded. The nose was small—ancestrally a North Sea nose. The mouth was very good but stretched extremely wide when she grinned, when she wept. Her forehead was powerful. When she came to the threshold of middle age, the lines of her naïve charm deepened; they would be permanent now. Really, everything about her was conspicuous, not only the size and shape of her head.
And there we have it, in just a few lines, he paints a portrait of his main character that will guide us through the story, explaining much of her behavior, her reactions and inner thoughts. It is crucial in Bellow to plan ahead, to establish facts early on, since nothing is left to chance in his writing. The story is partly centered in a conversation Clara holds with Laura Wong, a Chinese American dress designer that works with her and is her confidante (secondary characters are never decorations, and they often direct the course of the narrative). It is through these conversations held mostly at Clara’s office that we learn of her four marriages and her two suicide attempts. “Seven marriages between us, and we still love each other,” is Clara’s conciliatory remark to Ithiel. They loved each other but never got married. Of her current husband, Wilder, we learn he spends the day reading paperbacks, mostly thrillers by P. D. James and John Le Carré. One day, exasperated by his inertness, she “opened the window first and skimmed his paperback into Park Avenue”.
In Cousins one of the longer stories that make this collection, Ijah Brodsky is a grateful member of the big family (Jewish tradition is another leitmotiv throughout the book) and is asked to help in his cousin Tanky Metzger’s case in court. But as it often happens in Bellow’s careful knitting of the story, this is only but one sub-story, a division of the big plot that is meant to add contrast and highlight certain aspects of our main character, who is himself, as it happens frequently too, the narrator. And so, cousin Eunice is the intermediary, pleading on behalf of his brother. The story expands, including Ijah’s own, who was once a well-known TV personality when he created and conducted the program Court of Law. Going back to Tanky, we learn of his mob connections and the trouble he is in. Next comes cousin Milty he was stout, near obese, with a handsome haw face, profile-proud, his pampered body overdressed, bedizened, his glance defiant and contentious. After Milty comes Cousin Motty, who had been hurt in an automobile accident. And next cousin Riva, Motty’s wife, who gives Ijah some letters and documents that cousin Scholem has been sending to him through Motty. Apparently, he had made a great discovery in biology that would make possible a breakthrough in philosophy. But as we learn, Cousin Scholem had been a taxi driver in Chicago for twenty years. And the story ends with him, a war hero-philosopher-cabby in Paris, about to give a speech to a huge crowd. But before flying to Paris, Ijah meets with his ex-wife who tells him, rightly so: “if you had cared about me as you do about all those goofy, half-assed cousins, and such, we never would have divorced.” Yes, the stories can be intricate and complex, and yet the reader never seems lost.
Bellow’s eyes seem to work as an x-ray machine; he notices the unnoticed and not only in the physical world, since he can describe a face as well as an attitude, a peculiar way of walking that translates into fear, obesity that becomes magnanimity, a stuttering mouth that turns plaintive. The rhythmically forceful prose is like the current of a river that takes everything in its path, a chaotic and squalid mass that he then classifies and rearranges, and by the time he finishes a sentence, polished to the last detail, I can only imagine Bellow’s simile as he goes to the next. It is certainly the work of a master narrator.
Something to remember me by is one of the funniest of the lot. The story is structured as a father to son letter, going back to an event in Chicago, during the cold month of February in 1933. The protagonist is a high school senior and works for a florist as a delivery boy. When he finds himself in a hooker’s bed all naked while she throws his clothes out the window and runs away, he embarks in a ludicrous quest through the neighborhood in search for something to wear, and most importantly, as the old man writing the letter concedes, in search for himself. And in A Silver Dish when Woody Selbst (as perfectly and thoroughly a character can be: he is certainly one of Bellow's best creations) fights with his father, who is about to steal a silver dish he has hidden inside his trousers, the scene is transposed many years later, when father and son are in the same position, in a hospital bed. Here, the hilarious turns into the sorrowful; the transition happens as Woody realizes he is holding his dead father in his arms.
My favorite of the thirteen stories is probably (as any good reader knows, this type of decision is seldom circumstantial and often difficult; so let’s just say that today my favorite is…) The Bellarosa Connection where Bellow surpasses himself at times, as he tells the fascinating story of Harry Fonstein and Billy Rose. No need to go into the details of this extraordinary work to prove my point. Only maybe mention that in the great Introduction by Janice, Bellow’s fifth and last wife, she traces the genesis back to a dinner with friends and a story told at the end, that stayed in the writer’s mind. “Be always attentive”, was Flaubert’s advice to the young Maupassant, since everyday life is full of writing material. Then she recounts how her husband began to work on it, and made several drafts, some of them long enough to be the final story. But not convinced with the results, he would start all over again, till something clicked, knowing deep inside he had found the way. Seize the Day, someone would say. Bellow certainly did.
Modern life in America is another of his recurring themes and it is linked almost naturally with family values and love. Like Bellow himself, some of his characters have been married more than once, and still ask themselves what went wrong. The question is almost always allegorical. At the end of A Theft a story from 1990, the scene takes place in the old Westbury hotel, on East 69th Street, the place where Fernando Rey in his enigmatic character of Alain Charnier chose to stay when in NYC in the French Connection, the 1971 thriller film directed by William Friedkin. That a one-hundred-page story finishes (and is cleverly resolved) in style at the bar of the legendary hotel defines in a classic way the formal design masterminded by Below. The neighborhood, known to Manhattanites simply as “The Upper East Side”, is home to one of the greatest concentrations of personal wealth in the world. And this of course defines the central character of the story, Clara Velde. As is customary with Bellow, or what I can define as standard procedure, the story opens with a simple but to the point description of her looks, that goes beyond the mere physical features:
Clara Velde, to begin with what was conspicuous about her, had short blond hair, fashionably cut, growing upon a head unusually big. In a person of an inert character a head of such size might have seemed a deformity; in Clara, because she had so much personal force, it came across as ruggedly handsome. She needed that head; a mind like hers demanded space. She was big-boned; her shoulders were not broad but high. Her blue eyes, exceptionally large, grew prominent when she brooded. The nose was small—ancestrally a North Sea nose. The mouth was very good but stretched extremely wide when she grinned, when she wept. Her forehead was powerful. When she came to the threshold of middle age, the lines of her naïve charm deepened; they would be permanent now. Really, everything about her was conspicuous, not only the size and shape of her head.
And there we have it, in just a few lines, he paints a portrait of his main character that will guide us through the story, explaining much of her behavior, her reactions and inner thoughts. It is crucial in Bellow to plan ahead, to establish facts early on, since nothing is left to chance in his writing. The story is partly centered in a conversation Clara holds with Laura Wong, a Chinese American dress designer that works with her and is her confidante (secondary characters are never decorations, and they often direct the course of the narrative). It is through these conversations held mostly at Clara’s office that we learn of her four marriages and her two suicide attempts. “Seven marriages between us, and we still love each other,” is Clara’s conciliatory remark to Ithiel. They loved each other but never got married. Of her current husband, Wilder, we learn he spends the day reading paperbacks, mostly thrillers by P. D. James and John Le Carré. One day, exasperated by his inertness, she “opened the window first and skimmed his paperback into Park Avenue”.
In Cousins one of the longer stories that make this collection, Ijah Brodsky is a grateful member of the big family (Jewish tradition is another leitmotiv throughout the book) and is asked to help in his cousin Tanky Metzger’s case in court. But as it often happens in Bellow’s careful knitting of the story, this is only but one sub-story, a division of the big plot that is meant to add contrast and highlight certain aspects of our main character, who is himself, as it happens frequently too, the narrator. And so, cousin Eunice is the intermediary, pleading on behalf of his brother. The story expands, including Ijah’s own, who was once a well-known TV personality when he created and conducted the program Court of Law. Going back to Tanky, we learn of his mob connections and the trouble he is in. Next comes cousin Milty he was stout, near obese, with a handsome haw face, profile-proud, his pampered body overdressed, bedizened, his glance defiant and contentious. After Milty comes Cousin Motty, who had been hurt in an automobile accident. And next cousin Riva, Motty’s wife, who gives Ijah some letters and documents that cousin Scholem has been sending to him through Motty. Apparently, he had made a great discovery in biology that would make possible a breakthrough in philosophy. But as we learn, Cousin Scholem had been a taxi driver in Chicago for twenty years. And the story ends with him, a war hero-philosopher-cabby in Paris, about to give a speech to a huge crowd. But before flying to Paris, Ijah meets with his ex-wife who tells him, rightly so: “if you had cared about me as you do about all those goofy, half-assed cousins, and such, we never would have divorced.” Yes, the stories can be intricate and complex, and yet the reader never seems lost.
Bellow’s eyes seem to work as an x-ray machine; he notices the unnoticed and not only in the physical world, since he can describe a face as well as an attitude, a peculiar way of walking that translates into fear, obesity that becomes magnanimity, a stuttering mouth that turns plaintive. The rhythmically forceful prose is like the current of a river that takes everything in its path, a chaotic and squalid mass that he then classifies and rearranges, and by the time he finishes a sentence, polished to the last detail, I can only imagine Bellow’s simile as he goes to the next. It is certainly the work of a master narrator.
Something to remember me by is one of the funniest of the lot. The story is structured as a father to son letter, going back to an event in Chicago, during the cold month of February in 1933. The protagonist is a high school senior and works for a florist as a delivery boy. When he finds himself in a hooker’s bed all naked while she throws his clothes out the window and runs away, he embarks in a ludicrous quest through the neighborhood in search for something to wear, and most importantly, as the old man writing the letter concedes, in search for himself. And in A Silver Dish when Woody Selbst (as perfectly and thoroughly a character can be: he is certainly one of Bellow's best creations) fights with his father, who is about to steal a silver dish he has hidden inside his trousers, the scene is transposed many years later, when father and son are in the same position, in a hospital bed. Here, the hilarious turns into the sorrowful; the transition happens as Woody realizes he is holding his dead father in his arms.
My favorite of the thirteen stories is probably (as any good reader knows, this type of decision is seldom circumstantial and often difficult; so let’s just say that today my favorite is…) The Bellarosa Connection where Bellow surpasses himself at times, as he tells the fascinating story of Harry Fonstein and Billy Rose. No need to go into the details of this extraordinary work to prove my point. Only maybe mention that in the great Introduction by Janice, Bellow’s fifth and last wife, she traces the genesis back to a dinner with friends and a story told at the end, that stayed in the writer’s mind. “Be always attentive”, was Flaubert’s advice to the young Maupassant, since everyday life is full of writing material. Then she recounts how her husband began to work on it, and made several drafts, some of them long enough to be the final story. But not convinced with the results, he would start all over again, till something clicked, knowing deep inside he had found the way. Seize the Day, someone would say. Bellow certainly did.
January 21, 2011
This is my first Bellow read. Over the years I never bothered reading any of his books and overlooked them at the bookstores. This being my first volume was not that ecstatic.
The presented anthology of 13 stories come with a mix bag of history, humor, irony, metaphysics, the Holocaust, nostalgia, sex, modernity, migrant life in America and identity ; accompanied by a witty narration. Most of the characters be it Samuel Braun, Rob Rexler, Harry Fonstein, Woody Selbst, Katrina Goliger or Max Zetland are not the epitome of beauty but are unique in their own imperfections. Bellow has an exceptional artistry in metamorphosing mediocrity to splendor. His several protagonists are sort of heroic who overcome life fragilities and emerge as winners in their own way. Most of them are Jewish or other immigrants trying to find their identity on the American soil; similar to what Bellow experienced during his life. These stories have a personal Bellow touch reflecting many of his own perspectives on identity (he fought the constant labeling of being a “Jewish writer”) and modernity. In ‘The Old System’, he mentions, “Mankind was in a confusing uncomfortable, disagreeable stage in the evolution of consciousness”, which shows his disheartening acceptation of modernity. These stories bring out the essence of beauty and joy from the most unconventional settings.
That said and done, there are some disheartening shortcomings too. The narration is loose and needs trimming at certain edges, making it rather difficult to focus on the plot. The stories did have a solid start but somewhere in the middle it became a carnival of unexciting surroundings making me browse pages to find comfort. Also, Bellow’s portrayal of Sorella, Aunt Rose and even Max Zetland are filled with excessive and repetitive usage of adjectives to embellish human anatomy which tends to be a bit dragging. At times, I felt like erasing the characters from the highly subjective text.
One thing I detest while reading short stories is skipping pages and this is exactly what I did here. I do not want to be unjust and form a rapid opinion about Bellow based on this writing .I don’t deny that he is one the superior writers but this book failed to create that aura. Hence, I will read some more of his works before inferring whether Bellow is my ‘cup of tea’.
The presented anthology of 13 stories come with a mix bag of history, humor, irony, metaphysics, the Holocaust, nostalgia, sex, modernity, migrant life in America and identity ; accompanied by a witty narration. Most of the characters be it Samuel Braun, Rob Rexler, Harry Fonstein, Woody Selbst, Katrina Goliger or Max Zetland are not the epitome of beauty but are unique in their own imperfections. Bellow has an exceptional artistry in metamorphosing mediocrity to splendor. His several protagonists are sort of heroic who overcome life fragilities and emerge as winners in their own way. Most of them are Jewish or other immigrants trying to find their identity on the American soil; similar to what Bellow experienced during his life. These stories have a personal Bellow touch reflecting many of his own perspectives on identity (he fought the constant labeling of being a “Jewish writer”) and modernity. In ‘The Old System’, he mentions, “Mankind was in a confusing uncomfortable, disagreeable stage in the evolution of consciousness”, which shows his disheartening acceptation of modernity. These stories bring out the essence of beauty and joy from the most unconventional settings.
That said and done, there are some disheartening shortcomings too. The narration is loose and needs trimming at certain edges, making it rather difficult to focus on the plot. The stories did have a solid start but somewhere in the middle it became a carnival of unexciting surroundings making me browse pages to find comfort. Also, Bellow’s portrayal of Sorella, Aunt Rose and even Max Zetland are filled with excessive and repetitive usage of adjectives to embellish human anatomy which tends to be a bit dragging. At times, I felt like erasing the characters from the highly subjective text.
One thing I detest while reading short stories is skipping pages and this is exactly what I did here. I do not want to be unjust and form a rapid opinion about Bellow based on this writing .I don’t deny that he is one the superior writers but this book failed to create that aura. Hence, I will read some more of his works before inferring whether Bellow is my ‘cup of tea’.
December 4, 2012
For the sake of brevity I'll give a grade to each short story in succession first and then a summary explanation afterwards for those who wish to run that marathon with me, now, here, I can live my fantasy of telling a young Solomon 'Saul' Bellow as his creative writing teacher with one of those old world accents that he's 'good but could be better' but at least better criticism than 'oh, well, that's interesting':
By the St. Lawrence: B+
A Silver Dish: B
The Bellarossa Connection: B+
The Old System: A-
A Theft: D-
Looking for Mr. Green: A
Cousins: A
Zetland: B+
Leaving the Yellow House: B
What Kind of Day Did You Have?: B-
Mosby's Memoirs: B-
Him with His Foot in His Mouth: B+
Something to Remember Me By: A
Afterword: A+ (Wherein the writer explains and even codifies his position, very well done and does wonders for explaining the works that had come before regarding both intent and execution, Bellow at his most iconoclastic and most steadfast)
I know this isn't a popular opinion, but Bellow is not a great writer. A good writer? Yes, certainly. A very good writer? At times, yes. But great? No, afraid not. The lows of the likes of Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, as far as Jewish American fiction goes (the title of 'Jewish American Novelist apparently irked Bellow), may have been pretty dismal (Mailer's obnoxiousness, Roth's pathos to near pathological melodrama/whining, and Heller's seeming inability to escape from the shadow of Catch-22) but their highs were so much higher than what I've read so far of Bellow, they evinced from their respective oeuvres so much joy, so much angst, passion, anger, power, and a breadth of literary scope that Bellow just (from this collection and Dangling Man at least) cannot match. Also, it seems to me that Bellow isn't much of a storyteller. His disseminating of ideas is wonderful, but the narratives of some of the pieces in this collection feel tacked on, almost vestigial. Like Bellow was writing philosophical, literary or anthropological treatises (pick your poison) but he apparently remembered at some point that he's a novelist and should give these ideas some legs with characters, settings, voices, those sorts of things. But it's like taking a beautiful painting and putting a radio next to it with classical music playing, or a great movie with a man paid to sit next to the screen and give commentary at the theater.
But I gave this a four out of five. Why? Because Bellow's pros outweigh his cons here. And because I like lights at the ends of tunnels, I'll start with the negatives.
Bellow has an odd relationship with women, at least in his pages. There are way too many instances of women being depicted as unattractive in one way or another. Be they too fat, too skinny, with bulging or exaggerated physical features (usually faces and hands, though the male characters get it just as badly in description) and, to put it lightly, mentally inferior to most of the men, namely the protagonists, in their lives. They're not depicted as stupid by any means but too often they let out an exclamation of 'Oh, I just don't know!' or something to that effect to their male counterparts that comes off as both 'old fashioned' (sexist) and a bit too cutesy, as another reviewer put it, I think 'overly intellectualized and sexism made cutesy' in the vein of 'those gosh darn women!'. This is in large part why I rated A Theft so lowly, it takes the weaknesses of Bellow and explodes them, especially the issue of women characters. It's definitely the weakest piece of the collection.
But it's a molehill not a mountain, annoying but not, as my father would say 'a hanging offense'. Where Bellow loses points with me is in the repetitiousness of his settings and characters (seriously, how many different ways can you have older professorial gents, usually Jewish) look back on their lives and the great histories they lived through while coming to a revelatory, and usually somehow Jewish in origin but shot through the barrel of Western philosophy in execution, climax?). I understand that writers have their milieus that they feel comfortable in and, sometimes, Bellow hits it out of the park (The Old System, Him with His Foot in His Mouth, By the St. Lawrence) but just as often it's overly pretentious, overly allusive naval gazing that only returns to the plot when Bellow remembers to. Mosby's Memoirs and What Kind of Day Did You Have are particularly guilty of this though, like most of Bellow's work, the positives, the joys and genuine pleasure I got from these stories more than made up for the snobbishness and glacial pacing.
Dialogue is tough here, Bellow seems to strain under the lash of too many influences. He wants to be the street smart American Jew born of Russian Jews who's, at the same time, an American Jew who understands the folly of other American Jews and empathizing with European Jews whilst taking the best of both worlds and being able to see what they all can't. He wants to talk philosophy, anthropology, psychology, popular trends, old ideas, new ideas, Judaism, and on and on and on. With seemingly every story, and the dialogue along with every other aspect shows such strain that I'm surprised that his stories don't sink off the page and burrow in the ground or just burst from the pressure . And don't ask if Bellow's funny, when he tries, I cringe, but he's a wit, no doubt and occasionally manages a good joking slight or observation.
Bellow, despite the incredible praise showered on him (Martin Amis calling this collection 'Our greatest writer's greatest book', really?), has his detractors. Just from glancing at this wikipedia profile I saw that Vladimir Nabokov referred to him (privately) as a 'miserable mediocrity'. Now, I wouldn't go that far. Sure, Bellow is a bit too much like Dickens in his pacing and in his characters, there's an almost saccharine quality to even the dark aspects that, despite many claims to the contrary regarding both him and Dickens, to me can hardly be called 'realist'. There's an old fashioned austerity and earnestness to Bellow that almost borders on the severe at times. It's not Victorian, but it can be suffocating at times.
But what I enjoyed about Bellow more than anything else and what pushed this rating from a three to a four star was and is something quite simple: Bellow carries with him into each story a zest and enthusiasm for the craft that I've found lacking in many other of the 'greater' works. Cynicism and nihilism are great, hell, I love them both (irony there?) but if you don't give a damn about writing about life about most anything, then it just gets exhausting after a time to read about the meaninglessness of it all, the useless attempts at on and on and on. It's a rare writer that can espouse these things and be great, Bellow isn't one of these but he isn't trying to be. He writes with boldness and strength and in the words of John Updike (referring to Nabokov, again, a bit ironic here?) he writes prose ecstatically. And in works like Looking for Mr. Green and Something to Remember Me By this idea is best exemplified with this sense of literary expansiveness and adventurous exploration. Bellow does this so well that it almost clears him from his numerous shortcomings, and at times even makes the flaws into darker shades of a wonderful mosaic.
By the St. Lawrence: B+
A Silver Dish: B
The Bellarossa Connection: B+
The Old System: A-
A Theft: D-
Looking for Mr. Green: A
Cousins: A
Zetland: B+
Leaving the Yellow House: B
What Kind of Day Did You Have?: B-
Mosby's Memoirs: B-
Him with His Foot in His Mouth: B+
Something to Remember Me By: A
Afterword: A+ (Wherein the writer explains and even codifies his position, very well done and does wonders for explaining the works that had come before regarding both intent and execution, Bellow at his most iconoclastic and most steadfast)
I know this isn't a popular opinion, but Bellow is not a great writer. A good writer? Yes, certainly. A very good writer? At times, yes. But great? No, afraid not. The lows of the likes of Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, as far as Jewish American fiction goes (the title of 'Jewish American Novelist apparently irked Bellow), may have been pretty dismal (Mailer's obnoxiousness, Roth's pathos to near pathological melodrama/whining, and Heller's seeming inability to escape from the shadow of Catch-22) but their highs were so much higher than what I've read so far of Bellow, they evinced from their respective oeuvres so much joy, so much angst, passion, anger, power, and a breadth of literary scope that Bellow just (from this collection and Dangling Man at least) cannot match. Also, it seems to me that Bellow isn't much of a storyteller. His disseminating of ideas is wonderful, but the narratives of some of the pieces in this collection feel tacked on, almost vestigial. Like Bellow was writing philosophical, literary or anthropological treatises (pick your poison) but he apparently remembered at some point that he's a novelist and should give these ideas some legs with characters, settings, voices, those sorts of things. But it's like taking a beautiful painting and putting a radio next to it with classical music playing, or a great movie with a man paid to sit next to the screen and give commentary at the theater.
But I gave this a four out of five. Why? Because Bellow's pros outweigh his cons here. And because I like lights at the ends of tunnels, I'll start with the negatives.
Bellow has an odd relationship with women, at least in his pages. There are way too many instances of women being depicted as unattractive in one way or another. Be they too fat, too skinny, with bulging or exaggerated physical features (usually faces and hands, though the male characters get it just as badly in description) and, to put it lightly, mentally inferior to most of the men, namely the protagonists, in their lives. They're not depicted as stupid by any means but too often they let out an exclamation of 'Oh, I just don't know!' or something to that effect to their male counterparts that comes off as both 'old fashioned' (sexist) and a bit too cutesy, as another reviewer put it, I think 'overly intellectualized and sexism made cutesy' in the vein of 'those gosh darn women!'. This is in large part why I rated A Theft so lowly, it takes the weaknesses of Bellow and explodes them, especially the issue of women characters. It's definitely the weakest piece of the collection.
But it's a molehill not a mountain, annoying but not, as my father would say 'a hanging offense'. Where Bellow loses points with me is in the repetitiousness of his settings and characters (seriously, how many different ways can you have older professorial gents, usually Jewish) look back on their lives and the great histories they lived through while coming to a revelatory, and usually somehow Jewish in origin but shot through the barrel of Western philosophy in execution, climax?). I understand that writers have their milieus that they feel comfortable in and, sometimes, Bellow hits it out of the park (The Old System, Him with His Foot in His Mouth, By the St. Lawrence) but just as often it's overly pretentious, overly allusive naval gazing that only returns to the plot when Bellow remembers to. Mosby's Memoirs and What Kind of Day Did You Have are particularly guilty of this though, like most of Bellow's work, the positives, the joys and genuine pleasure I got from these stories more than made up for the snobbishness and glacial pacing.
Dialogue is tough here, Bellow seems to strain under the lash of too many influences. He wants to be the street smart American Jew born of Russian Jews who's, at the same time, an American Jew who understands the folly of other American Jews and empathizing with European Jews whilst taking the best of both worlds and being able to see what they all can't. He wants to talk philosophy, anthropology, psychology, popular trends, old ideas, new ideas, Judaism, and on and on and on. With seemingly every story, and the dialogue along with every other aspect shows such strain that I'm surprised that his stories don't sink off the page and burrow in the ground or just burst from the pressure . And don't ask if Bellow's funny, when he tries, I cringe, but he's a wit, no doubt and occasionally manages a good joking slight or observation.
Bellow, despite the incredible praise showered on him (Martin Amis calling this collection 'Our greatest writer's greatest book', really?), has his detractors. Just from glancing at this wikipedia profile I saw that Vladimir Nabokov referred to him (privately) as a 'miserable mediocrity'. Now, I wouldn't go that far. Sure, Bellow is a bit too much like Dickens in his pacing and in his characters, there's an almost saccharine quality to even the dark aspects that, despite many claims to the contrary regarding both him and Dickens, to me can hardly be called 'realist'. There's an old fashioned austerity and earnestness to Bellow that almost borders on the severe at times. It's not Victorian, but it can be suffocating at times.
But what I enjoyed about Bellow more than anything else and what pushed this rating from a three to a four star was and is something quite simple: Bellow carries with him into each story a zest and enthusiasm for the craft that I've found lacking in many other of the 'greater' works. Cynicism and nihilism are great, hell, I love them both (irony there?) but if you don't give a damn about writing about life about most anything, then it just gets exhausting after a time to read about the meaninglessness of it all, the useless attempts at on and on and on. It's a rare writer that can espouse these things and be great, Bellow isn't one of these but he isn't trying to be. He writes with boldness and strength and in the words of John Updike (referring to Nabokov, again, a bit ironic here?) he writes prose ecstatically. And in works like Looking for Mr. Green and Something to Remember Me By this idea is best exemplified with this sense of literary expansiveness and adventurous exploration. Bellow does this so well that it almost clears him from his numerous shortcomings, and at times even makes the flaws into darker shades of a wonderful mosaic.
October 23, 2010
I managed to get through ten of the thirteen stories in this collection and then I had to stop. I will however, return to the remaining three at some point in the future.
Bellow paints a stark picture of Depression-era Chicago in many of the stories which are centred within the Jewish community. During his life, he decried being labelled a Jewish writer but his immersion in that culture does not absolve him of the moniker. Personally, I think he should have worn the badge with pride, for he brilliantly explores the depth in his Jewish characters, exposing their sharp edges, their ambition to make it in the new world (by hook or by crook), their tribal nature, and most of all, he draws the distinction between the European Jew who has earned his stripes by suffering the pogroms and persecutions of the past, and the American Jew who is selling his by assimilating and embracing the American Way.
Some interesting factoids of the era get tossed into the mix as we read along: how until the nineteenth century, the Pope entered the Jewish section of Rome and spat ritually on the garments of the chief Rabbi; how common it was to bribe private medical colleges with “donations” to earn a degree in the US; how the public service system was riddled with more bribery; and how the prisoner gets his hernia fixed, cataracts removed, false teeth and hearing aid installed, all at the cost of the US penal system, costs he could never afford himself while going straight.
Some lines of dialogue say a lot: “You don’t support your children,” Mrs Skoglund says, on meeting Morris Selbst for the first time, revealing much of both their characters. Bellow is pre-occupied with fat women and big men and many of his characters fall into these categories – is this a metaphor for the American Jew who has forsaken his origins and settled for life, liberty and the pursuit of Mac-happiness?
Why did I stop reading then: because of the density and waywardness of the prose. In particular, the longer stories are packed with lots of interesting but inconsequential detail. I guess, a Nobel laureate has the luxury of drifting and expecting his readers to catch up, not really caring for the contract he has with them, and ignoring their entertainment and enlightenment quotients. There are digressions into philosophy, poetry, politics, literature, and the lives of peripheral characters, in random order, which only serve to move the reader away from the central conflict in many of the stories, and these parts are tedious to get through. And his character descriptions are often overdone; I was never allowed to forget Sorella Fonstein’s “fatness” – it came up at least a couple of times on every page. I liked the shorter pieces however, like “A Silver Dish,” “Looking for Mr. Green,” and “Something to Remember Me By,” which seemed to enforce more discipline on Bellow with their conciseness.
Is Bellow a master of the short story form? Probably not. Is he a master of human observation – absolutely, for in plumbing his characters in these sketches, he has revealed much of what is hidden in the lives of his people who fled European persecution and toiled as bakers, shopkeepers, grocers, taxi drivers, mobsters, political advisors, lawyers and writers, wrestling with guilt and ambition while nursing dreams of success for themselves and their progeny in this New World of opportunity which was in turn, ironically, mired in the throes of the Great Depression. Just as his critics had labelled him, he seems to be saying, “You can run but you can’t hide – once a Jew, always one.”
Bellow paints a stark picture of Depression-era Chicago in many of the stories which are centred within the Jewish community. During his life, he decried being labelled a Jewish writer but his immersion in that culture does not absolve him of the moniker. Personally, I think he should have worn the badge with pride, for he brilliantly explores the depth in his Jewish characters, exposing their sharp edges, their ambition to make it in the new world (by hook or by crook), their tribal nature, and most of all, he draws the distinction between the European Jew who has earned his stripes by suffering the pogroms and persecutions of the past, and the American Jew who is selling his by assimilating and embracing the American Way.
Some interesting factoids of the era get tossed into the mix as we read along: how until the nineteenth century, the Pope entered the Jewish section of Rome and spat ritually on the garments of the chief Rabbi; how common it was to bribe private medical colleges with “donations” to earn a degree in the US; how the public service system was riddled with more bribery; and how the prisoner gets his hernia fixed, cataracts removed, false teeth and hearing aid installed, all at the cost of the US penal system, costs he could never afford himself while going straight.
Some lines of dialogue say a lot: “You don’t support your children,” Mrs Skoglund says, on meeting Morris Selbst for the first time, revealing much of both their characters. Bellow is pre-occupied with fat women and big men and many of his characters fall into these categories – is this a metaphor for the American Jew who has forsaken his origins and settled for life, liberty and the pursuit of Mac-happiness?
Why did I stop reading then: because of the density and waywardness of the prose. In particular, the longer stories are packed with lots of interesting but inconsequential detail. I guess, a Nobel laureate has the luxury of drifting and expecting his readers to catch up, not really caring for the contract he has with them, and ignoring their entertainment and enlightenment quotients. There are digressions into philosophy, poetry, politics, literature, and the lives of peripheral characters, in random order, which only serve to move the reader away from the central conflict in many of the stories, and these parts are tedious to get through. And his character descriptions are often overdone; I was never allowed to forget Sorella Fonstein’s “fatness” – it came up at least a couple of times on every page. I liked the shorter pieces however, like “A Silver Dish,” “Looking for Mr. Green,” and “Something to Remember Me By,” which seemed to enforce more discipline on Bellow with their conciseness.
Is Bellow a master of the short story form? Probably not. Is he a master of human observation – absolutely, for in plumbing his characters in these sketches, he has revealed much of what is hidden in the lives of his people who fled European persecution and toiled as bakers, shopkeepers, grocers, taxi drivers, mobsters, political advisors, lawyers and writers, wrestling with guilt and ambition while nursing dreams of success for themselves and their progeny in this New World of opportunity which was in turn, ironically, mired in the throes of the Great Depression. Just as his critics had labelled him, he seems to be saying, “You can run but you can’t hide – once a Jew, always one.”
December 14, 2024
Not really short stories, more like repackaged novellas. Surprised I didn’t like the collection more than I did. Economy normally reigns in Bellow’s excesses, which is why Seize the Day has always been better than Humboldt’s Gift or Herzog.
March 3, 2017
Rereading "The Old System."
July 9, 2024
"Albert was wasted; his legs forked under the covers like winter branches, and his courtroom voice was as dim as a child's toy xylophone."
If that sentence doesn't make you love Saul Bellow, I don't know what will.
Read all of these except the short novel "A Theft," having heard that it was by far the weakest (and longest) of the collection.
IMHO no writer I've read - other than Shakespeare - has so fully captured the breadth and depth of human experience.
Favorites:
A Father-to-Be (1955)
Leaving the Yellow House (1958)
Looking for Mr. Green (1968)
Cousins (1984)
Him With His Foot In His Mouth (1984)
By the St. Lawrence (1995)
If that sentence doesn't make you love Saul Bellow, I don't know what will.
Read all of these except the short novel "A Theft," having heard that it was by far the weakest (and longest) of the collection.
IMHO no writer I've read - other than Shakespeare - has so fully captured the breadth and depth of human experience.
Favorites:
A Father-to-Be (1955)
Leaving the Yellow House (1958)
Looking for Mr. Green (1968)
Cousins (1984)
Him With His Foot In His Mouth (1984)
By the St. Lawrence (1995)
August 27, 2011
William Gass said, 'Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.' Saul Bellow brings this quote to life with an amazing collection of stories that are at once engrossing and soulful. 'What Kind of Day Did You Have?', the longest in the collection, is also the best. Brilliant, intense stuff! And undoubtedly, here is an addition to my list of favourite authors.
November 2, 2025
I don’t really get Saul Bellow. I found this collection very hard work. I struggled to finish it and didn’t find any of the stories engaging. Shame as I had been looking forward to it and love short stories. This is not to argue he’s not a fine writer – just that I don’t like his style of writing. I will be avoiding him in future.
November 27, 2022
Bellow's immigrant characters are or are becoming American: generous openness, boastful posturing, bluff folksiness, ill-digested ideas.
April 19, 2025
Saul Bellow’s writing is a complex, sometimes tortuous journey through complicated, even confused identity: an identity that is first and foremost Jewish, immigrant in origin, profoundly committed to American values (always negotiable), rooted in the fickle nutrient of family soil. This is not writing for the fainthearted. There are no whodunnit stories, no reassuring clichés onto which a lazy reader might latch, no linear plots that trick the perception of time into a linear illusion. Here, there is only life in all of its unpredictable complexity, its shifting associations, often undermining the relationships that at first sight bond people strongly together. It’s all here, if, that is, you can’t believe a word of it.
There are some things that are indisputable. But things are not always what they seem. Sometimes, even success can be failure, failure to live up to the future someone else envisaged: thus often rendering failure a success. Motives, fears, achievements, ambitions, both financial and matrimonial, are always negotiable. Even nihilism, it seems, has its no-nos. And what’s more, there are some people who believe that “…every clever modern man is his own avant-garde invention. To be avant-garde means to tamper with yourself, to have a personal project requiring a histrionic routine - in short, to put on an act.” Someone else, I recall, once wrote that all the world’s a stage.
Don’t read Saul Bellow if your idea of a book is a linear plot with any form of resolution. He is not that simplistic a writer. But also don’t read these stories without a commitment to enter into their worlds, even though they might, at times, be less than welcoming, be even untrustworthy.
Stories is just a word, by the way, and perhaps an inaccurate one. These are long enough to be called novellas for the most part, and the book itself approaches a quarter of a million words: so it is long. But, like life itself, it cannot be rushed: to do so would be to undermine its very purpose, if purpose is what it possesses at its core. What is indisputable is its process, because this seems to pursue its own goals, often leaving participants drowning in the wake it rises from the inevitability of its own pursuit.
Saul Bellow did not win a Nobel prize for nothing. Or perhaps he did: nihilism might have its no-nos, but maximalism can never for a moment attain its goals, since everything, by definition, cannot be covered. Like life, just go with the flow. Where it takes you will be of interest for now and, later, for memory. It’s the experience that counts. There is nothing else.
There are some things that are indisputable. But things are not always what they seem. Sometimes, even success can be failure, failure to live up to the future someone else envisaged: thus often rendering failure a success. Motives, fears, achievements, ambitions, both financial and matrimonial, are always negotiable. Even nihilism, it seems, has its no-nos. And what’s more, there are some people who believe that “…every clever modern man is his own avant-garde invention. To be avant-garde means to tamper with yourself, to have a personal project requiring a histrionic routine - in short, to put on an act.” Someone else, I recall, once wrote that all the world’s a stage.
Don’t read Saul Bellow if your idea of a book is a linear plot with any form of resolution. He is not that simplistic a writer. But also don’t read these stories without a commitment to enter into their worlds, even though they might, at times, be less than welcoming, be even untrustworthy.
Stories is just a word, by the way, and perhaps an inaccurate one. These are long enough to be called novellas for the most part, and the book itself approaches a quarter of a million words: so it is long. But, like life itself, it cannot be rushed: to do so would be to undermine its very purpose, if purpose is what it possesses at its core. What is indisputable is its process, because this seems to pursue its own goals, often leaving participants drowning in the wake it rises from the inevitability of its own pursuit.
Saul Bellow did not win a Nobel prize for nothing. Or perhaps he did: nihilism might have its no-nos, but maximalism can never for a moment attain its goals, since everything, by definition, cannot be covered. Like life, just go with the flow. Where it takes you will be of interest for now and, later, for memory. It’s the experience that counts. There is nothing else.
July 24, 2019
A difficult read, but worth it. Bellow's style certainly won't be for everyone, but there is no denying he is a masterful writer.
I do enjoy his novels more than his short-stories.
As usual I find the first reading of most literature to be something of an experiment. It is only on subsequent readings do you find the more subtle beauties coming forward.
The first reading is mostly about, 'What's happening?'
The next time you know what is happening, and you can enjoy the language and the smaller details.
Bellow is worth the patience it takes. I think some people get frustrated by the lack of plot. In these short-stories it is more about character development and interaction. It is like getting a few scenes from the movie. And that is all you get.
I had a teacher tell me when I was a teenager, 'You will eventually stop reading for plot.' I thought, 'But what else is there?'
I see now. It is why people don't like Catch-22 and As I Lay Dying, they are searching for the story, and the authors have hidden it.
I do enjoy his novels more than his short-stories.
As usual I find the first reading of most literature to be something of an experiment. It is only on subsequent readings do you find the more subtle beauties coming forward.
The first reading is mostly about, 'What's happening?'
The next time you know what is happening, and you can enjoy the language and the smaller details.
Bellow is worth the patience it takes. I think some people get frustrated by the lack of plot. In these short-stories it is more about character development and interaction. It is like getting a few scenes from the movie. And that is all you get.
I had a teacher tell me when I was a teenager, 'You will eventually stop reading for plot.' I thought, 'But what else is there?'
I see now. It is why people don't like Catch-22 and As I Lay Dying, they are searching for the story, and the authors have hidden it.
February 6, 2018
I have to consider Bellow as second to no other American writer. Maybe Faulkner. This collection of stories is a mix, though. The Silver Dish is an amazing story, a lesson in writing, a perfect narrative voice that evokes the complexity of love. Now, having made my hyperbolic assessment of Bellow's virtuosity, I have to admit that a few pieces in this collection had racist and misogynist undercurrents that couldn't be excused by context. As the current leader of the free world might say (presuming he reads): Sad.
July 7, 2020
Bellow never leaves you with a dud! Each of these stories is great, with nuanced insights into the human condition, humor, and of course some of the most deft sentences ever penned in the history of literature. Bellow has certainly earned his place in the triumvirate of American letters, along with Updike and Roth.
March 26, 2019
Great collection. My favorites were: By the St. Lawrence, Cousins, Leaving the Yellow House, Him with His Foot in His Mouth, and Something to Remember Me By.
July 11, 2019
Read 4 of the stories. Not a fan. All very boring. I prefer Roth.
July 12, 2023
I read only "What Kind of Day Did you Have." this story was well written but a bit confusing...it did not have any sort of ending.
December 13, 2020
Saul Bellow, where have you been all my life?!
October 21, 2025
Saul Bellow’s *Collected Stories* is not merely a literary anthology—it’s a moral, philosophical, and stylistic kaleidoscope of twentieth-century consciousness. To read these stories together is to witness a single mind wrestling with the contradictions of modern existence: intellect versus instinct, reason versus emotion, city life versus spiritual yearning.
Edited with subtle grace by Janis Bellow, this collection functions almost like a map of Bellow’s evolution—from a Chicago realist with a sharp ear for Jewish-American speech to an existential ironist who turned neurosis into lyricism.
Bellow’s short fiction never achieved the towering fame of his novels—*Herzog*, *Henderson the Rain King*, *Humboldt’s Gift*—but that’s precisely why *Collected Stories* feels like an intimate discovery. Here, stripped of the sprawl of the novel, we get Bellow distilled: his wit undiluted, his rhythms pure, his characters still vibrating from the fever of being alive. Each story becomes a small crucible for his grand questions: What does it mean to be good in a corrupt world? How can intellect coexist with the ache of the heart? Is human decency a form of folly, or is it the last remaining form of sanity?
The collection opens with works like *Looking for Mr. Green* and *By the St. Lawrence*, pieces from Bellow’s earlier career that already display his fascination with outsiders wandering through bureaucratic or spiritual wastelands. In *Looking for Mr. Green*, a young relief worker searches for a man who seems to have vanished—a Kafka-esque premise that allows Bellow to explore how institutions depersonalize the poor and the idealistic alike. The quest to find Mr. Green becomes metaphysical: how does one locate meaning when systems are designed to erase it?
There’s an unmistakable echo of Bellow’s Depression-era sensibilities here. The prose is lean, the moral undertone heavy, and the humor dark. Yet even in these serious stories, his comic timing is impeccable. A Bellow character can be philosophically desolate one moment and hilariously self-mocking the next. That oscillation—between sorrow and laughter—became his signature.
In *The Old System*, Bellow sketches a family divided by assimilation, religion, and the strange American urge to “succeed.” The protagonist, Dr. Braun, is a scientist who has achieved professional triumph but feels metaphysically homeless. His sister, Henia, clings to spiritual consolation, while Braun clings to empirical reason. When she falls ill, he tries to cure her body but cannot touch her soul. The story dramatizes Bellow’s lifelong tension between intellect and belief—between the Chicago of industry and the Jerusalem of faith.
When we reach *Leaving the Yellow House* or *Him With His Foot in His Mouth*, Bellow’s style thickens and his characters grow more self-conscious. These middle-period stories teem with guilt, irony, and erotic confusion. *Leaving the Yellow House*, for example, centers on Hattie, an aging alcoholic living alone in a desert town. She’s cranky, proud, and unrepentant—until an accident forces her to confront her own moral bankruptcy. What makes the story unforgettable is Bellow’s refusal to punish her; instead, he treats her meanness as a symptom of thwarted vitality. Hattie is both pathetic and heroic, a woman raging against decay with the only tools she has left: memory and sarcasm.
Bellow’s humor becomes darker here, his syntax more baroque, his paragraphs longer and richer. Reading these middle stories feels like wading through a fugue of complaint and revelation. His protagonists—often aging men or women who once believed in intellect or love—find themselves reduced to the ridiculous. Yet Bellow redeems them with language. Every insult, every regret, every philosophical aside is rendered in prose so musical that despair itself begins to sing.
The title story *Him With His Foot in His Mouth* is almost a self-portrait. An erudite, talkative man writes a letter of apology for an old insult he once delivered to a librarian. The letter becomes an odyssey of self-exposure—funny, shameful, self-pitying, and wise. This is Bellow’s favorite human type: the blabbermouth intellectual who thinks too much and feels too deeply, aware that his words have become both his salvation and his curse. In that sense, every Bellow story is an act of confession disguised as comedy.
By the time we arrive at late masterpieces like *Something to Remember Me By*, *The Bellarosa Connection*, or *A Silver Dish*, the moral temperature of Bellow’s world has shifted. The exuberant intellectual chaos of *Herzog* gives way to elegiac calm. Mortality looms large. Love, friendship, and Jewish identity appear not as philosophical problems but as matters of grace.
Take *A Silver Dish*—perhaps Bellow’s most perfect short story. It recounts the life of Woody Selbst, a Chicago businessman haunted by his father’s thievery and his mother’s faith. The story’s emotional climax—when Woody’s father literally steals the communion dish from a minister—encapsulates Bellow’s genius for turning slapstick into tragedy. The scene is absurd and sacred all at once. Woody’s father, a conman, embodies the vitality of the immigrant will to survive; his mother, a pious convert, embodies the moral restraint of faith. Caught between them, Woody becomes a modern Everyman, trying to balance decency with desire. When the story ends with his father’s death, the reader feels the weight of an entire century of Jewish-American longing compressed into one family anecdote.
Similarly, *Something to Remember Me By*—the story that closes the collection—is both bawdy and heartbreaking. A young man’s sexual misadventure in Depression-era Chicago becomes a meditation on shame, memory, and the loss of innocence. The tone is nostalgic but unsentimental, as if Bellow were laughing through tears. It’s the perfect coda: Bellow, near the end of his career, looking back at the boy he once was, still bewildered by the comedy of existence.
To discuss Bellow without mentioning his language is impossible. His sentences don’t merely convey thought; they perform thought. They twist, double back, contradict themselves, and then burst into lyric epiphany. In a single paragraph, Bellow can go from slapstick to theology. The Chicago streets, the immigrant idioms, the Yiddish inflections—all combine into a symphonic prose that remains unmatched in American letters.
In *Collected Stories*, we see that linguistic evolution in miniature. The early stories are disciplined, almost Hemingway-like. The middle ones grow lush and rhapsodic, full of digressions. The later ones, written after Bellow won the Nobel Prize, achieve a serene authority—wise without being pompous, tender without sentimentality. One feels the ghost of Joyce and the grit of Dreiser, filtered through a uniquely Bellowian rhythm that oscillates between sermon and stand-up routine.
This rhythm also serves a moral purpose. Bellow believed that the artist’s duty was to affirm life, even when depicting despair. His characters may suffer, but they never stop talking, thinking, seeking. The very act of articulation becomes redemptive. In a world of noise, the ability to speak meaningfully—to shape chaos into narrative—is itself a form of resistance.
Across these stories, a few obsessions recur like musical motifs. The first is **the exile’s consciousness**. Whether it’s the Jewish immigrant in Chicago or the assimilated intellectual at a New York cocktail party, Bellow’s characters are perpetual outsiders. They feel the world’s vulgarity too keenly but are powerless to transcend it. They crave moral clarity but live amid confusion. This outsider’s tension gives Bellow’s humor its edge and his pathos its credibility.
The second recurring theme is **moral intelligence versus worldly success**. In Bellow’s universe, the man of intellect is often a loser in practical terms—divorced, broke, alienated—but he retains something the world cannot commodify: the capacity for wonder. Even the most cynical Bellow hero believes, secretly, in transcendence. He may mock the sacred, but he yearns for it all the same. That paradox is what makes his characters unforgettable: they are skeptics who can’t stop praying.
Third, there’s **the battle between eros and conscience**. Bellow never moralizes about sex, but he treats it as an existential force—comic, humiliating, and divine. His lovers are neurotics in search of authenticity, fumbling toward connection in a world obsessed with performance. In stories like *Leaving the Yellow House* or *Theft*, we see how desire exposes character; it’s never just about pleasure, always about revelation.
And finally, there’s **death**—not as horror but as a clarifying lens. Bellow once said that the awareness of death “teaches us to see the living world with fresh eyes.” His late stories live by that creed. Every goodbye, every loss, becomes a chance to rediscover tenderness. Even the dying characters crack jokes, because laughter is the only defiance left.
What makes Bellow’s short fiction endure is not plot but presence. Each narrator, each consciousness, is so alive that even their digressions feel essential. He once wrote that the novelist’s task is “to show how things look to the human soul in its perplexity.” In *Collected Stories*, that mission extends to the short form. Whether he’s describing a Chicago street corner or a lover’s quarrel, Bellow insists on the complexity of perception. He refuses simplification. His people are never merely victims or villains; they are contradictions in motion.
There’s also a distinctly Jewish moral register running through these stories—not in a doctrinal sense, but in their attention to guilt, mercy, and the burden of history. Bellow’s Judaism is cultural, existential, comic. His characters carry the memory of exile not as piety but as irony. They question everything, including God, but never abandon the search for meaning. In this sense, Bellow’s fiction feels like a dialogue between the Talmud and the jazz club, between ancient argument and American improvisation.
Janis Bellow’s role as editor deserves mention. She organizes the stories chronologically, allowing readers to trace Bellow’s stylistic metamorphosis. Her introduction provides context without sentimentality; she understands that Bellow’s greatness lies not only in what he wrote but in how he made language itself a moral act. The collection’s curation feels organic—neither hagiographic nor academic. It’s as if she’s saying: here is the man as he sounded at different hours of his life.
To read *Collected Stories* today, in an age of irony and algorithms, is almost shocking. Bellow demands slow reading. His syntax won’t let you skim. You find yourself rereading sentences just to savor the music. And the reward is immense. These stories remind you that fiction is not escapism—it’s confrontation. You confront loneliness, absurdity, vanity, hope. You confront yourself.
Yet for all their intellectual depth, Bellow’s stories remain emotionally immediate. His people talk the way we think: with interruptions, contradictions, sudden insights. The result is prose that feels alive, breathing. Even his metaphors seem to shrug and gesture like real people. When Bellow describes a face “as sad as a burnt kettle,” you don’t analyze it—you feel it.
Reading him also restores faith in the idea of the *writer as moral witness*. Bellow does not preach, but he believes in the possibility of moral awareness. His protagonists are often failures, but they fail beautifully—because they never stop reflecting. In a culture that prizes certainty, Bellow’s ambiguity feels bracingly honest.
The shadow of Bellow’s short fiction extends across American literature. You can hear echoes of his rhythm in Philip Roth’s *Goodbye, Columbus*, in Cynthia Ozick’s moral wit, in Don DeLillo’s urban lyricism. Even David Foster Wallace, in his mixture of erudition and self-mockery, owes something to Bellow’s tone. Yet no one quite matches his blend of street talk and metaphysics. He wrote as if Dostoevsky had been reborn in Chicago with a jazz sax in hand.
*Collected Stories* also reasserts the short story as a testing ground for big ideas. Bellow shows that you don’t need 400 pages to dramatize the soul’s battle with the modern world. You can do it in twenty, if your sentences burn hot enough.
When you close *Collected Stories*, you feel both exhausted and enlarged. Exhausted because Bellow’s prose demands your full attention; enlarged because it rewards that attention with moral clarity. His stories remind us that intelligence, humor, and compassion are not opposites—they are different registers of the same human music.
Bellow once described art as “the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.” That’s exactly what these stories accomplish. Amid all the noise of ambition and alienation, they offer moments of quiet recognition—the sudden awareness that, yes, this is what it feels like to be human.
In an era where fiction often trades moral depth for cleverness, *Collected Stories* stands as proof that the old virtues—sympathy, curiosity, wonder—still matter. Saul Bellow never stopped believing in the grandeur of the human soul, even when that soul was trapped in the most ridiculous circumstances. That faith, expressed through laughter and lament, makes these stories timeless.
Edited with subtle grace by Janis Bellow, this collection functions almost like a map of Bellow’s evolution—from a Chicago realist with a sharp ear for Jewish-American speech to an existential ironist who turned neurosis into lyricism.
Bellow’s short fiction never achieved the towering fame of his novels—*Herzog*, *Henderson the Rain King*, *Humboldt’s Gift*—but that’s precisely why *Collected Stories* feels like an intimate discovery. Here, stripped of the sprawl of the novel, we get Bellow distilled: his wit undiluted, his rhythms pure, his characters still vibrating from the fever of being alive. Each story becomes a small crucible for his grand questions: What does it mean to be good in a corrupt world? How can intellect coexist with the ache of the heart? Is human decency a form of folly, or is it the last remaining form of sanity?
The collection opens with works like *Looking for Mr. Green* and *By the St. Lawrence*, pieces from Bellow’s earlier career that already display his fascination with outsiders wandering through bureaucratic or spiritual wastelands. In *Looking for Mr. Green*, a young relief worker searches for a man who seems to have vanished—a Kafka-esque premise that allows Bellow to explore how institutions depersonalize the poor and the idealistic alike. The quest to find Mr. Green becomes metaphysical: how does one locate meaning when systems are designed to erase it?
There’s an unmistakable echo of Bellow’s Depression-era sensibilities here. The prose is lean, the moral undertone heavy, and the humor dark. Yet even in these serious stories, his comic timing is impeccable. A Bellow character can be philosophically desolate one moment and hilariously self-mocking the next. That oscillation—between sorrow and laughter—became his signature.
In *The Old System*, Bellow sketches a family divided by assimilation, religion, and the strange American urge to “succeed.” The protagonist, Dr. Braun, is a scientist who has achieved professional triumph but feels metaphysically homeless. His sister, Henia, clings to spiritual consolation, while Braun clings to empirical reason. When she falls ill, he tries to cure her body but cannot touch her soul. The story dramatizes Bellow’s lifelong tension between intellect and belief—between the Chicago of industry and the Jerusalem of faith.
When we reach *Leaving the Yellow House* or *Him With His Foot in His Mouth*, Bellow’s style thickens and his characters grow more self-conscious. These middle-period stories teem with guilt, irony, and erotic confusion. *Leaving the Yellow House*, for example, centers on Hattie, an aging alcoholic living alone in a desert town. She’s cranky, proud, and unrepentant—until an accident forces her to confront her own moral bankruptcy. What makes the story unforgettable is Bellow’s refusal to punish her; instead, he treats her meanness as a symptom of thwarted vitality. Hattie is both pathetic and heroic, a woman raging against decay with the only tools she has left: memory and sarcasm.
Bellow’s humor becomes darker here, his syntax more baroque, his paragraphs longer and richer. Reading these middle stories feels like wading through a fugue of complaint and revelation. His protagonists—often aging men or women who once believed in intellect or love—find themselves reduced to the ridiculous. Yet Bellow redeems them with language. Every insult, every regret, every philosophical aside is rendered in prose so musical that despair itself begins to sing.
The title story *Him With His Foot in His Mouth* is almost a self-portrait. An erudite, talkative man writes a letter of apology for an old insult he once delivered to a librarian. The letter becomes an odyssey of self-exposure—funny, shameful, self-pitying, and wise. This is Bellow’s favorite human type: the blabbermouth intellectual who thinks too much and feels too deeply, aware that his words have become both his salvation and his curse. In that sense, every Bellow story is an act of confession disguised as comedy.
By the time we arrive at late masterpieces like *Something to Remember Me By*, *The Bellarosa Connection*, or *A Silver Dish*, the moral temperature of Bellow’s world has shifted. The exuberant intellectual chaos of *Herzog* gives way to elegiac calm. Mortality looms large. Love, friendship, and Jewish identity appear not as philosophical problems but as matters of grace.
Take *A Silver Dish*—perhaps Bellow’s most perfect short story. It recounts the life of Woody Selbst, a Chicago businessman haunted by his father’s thievery and his mother’s faith. The story’s emotional climax—when Woody’s father literally steals the communion dish from a minister—encapsulates Bellow’s genius for turning slapstick into tragedy. The scene is absurd and sacred all at once. Woody’s father, a conman, embodies the vitality of the immigrant will to survive; his mother, a pious convert, embodies the moral restraint of faith. Caught between them, Woody becomes a modern Everyman, trying to balance decency with desire. When the story ends with his father’s death, the reader feels the weight of an entire century of Jewish-American longing compressed into one family anecdote.
Similarly, *Something to Remember Me By*—the story that closes the collection—is both bawdy and heartbreaking. A young man’s sexual misadventure in Depression-era Chicago becomes a meditation on shame, memory, and the loss of innocence. The tone is nostalgic but unsentimental, as if Bellow were laughing through tears. It’s the perfect coda: Bellow, near the end of his career, looking back at the boy he once was, still bewildered by the comedy of existence.
To discuss Bellow without mentioning his language is impossible. His sentences don’t merely convey thought; they perform thought. They twist, double back, contradict themselves, and then burst into lyric epiphany. In a single paragraph, Bellow can go from slapstick to theology. The Chicago streets, the immigrant idioms, the Yiddish inflections—all combine into a symphonic prose that remains unmatched in American letters.
In *Collected Stories*, we see that linguistic evolution in miniature. The early stories are disciplined, almost Hemingway-like. The middle ones grow lush and rhapsodic, full of digressions. The later ones, written after Bellow won the Nobel Prize, achieve a serene authority—wise without being pompous, tender without sentimentality. One feels the ghost of Joyce and the grit of Dreiser, filtered through a uniquely Bellowian rhythm that oscillates between sermon and stand-up routine.
This rhythm also serves a moral purpose. Bellow believed that the artist’s duty was to affirm life, even when depicting despair. His characters may suffer, but they never stop talking, thinking, seeking. The very act of articulation becomes redemptive. In a world of noise, the ability to speak meaningfully—to shape chaos into narrative—is itself a form of resistance.
Across these stories, a few obsessions recur like musical motifs. The first is **the exile’s consciousness**. Whether it’s the Jewish immigrant in Chicago or the assimilated intellectual at a New York cocktail party, Bellow’s characters are perpetual outsiders. They feel the world’s vulgarity too keenly but are powerless to transcend it. They crave moral clarity but live amid confusion. This outsider’s tension gives Bellow’s humor its edge and his pathos its credibility.
The second recurring theme is **moral intelligence versus worldly success**. In Bellow’s universe, the man of intellect is often a loser in practical terms—divorced, broke, alienated—but he retains something the world cannot commodify: the capacity for wonder. Even the most cynical Bellow hero believes, secretly, in transcendence. He may mock the sacred, but he yearns for it all the same. That paradox is what makes his characters unforgettable: they are skeptics who can’t stop praying.
Third, there’s **the battle between eros and conscience**. Bellow never moralizes about sex, but he treats it as an existential force—comic, humiliating, and divine. His lovers are neurotics in search of authenticity, fumbling toward connection in a world obsessed with performance. In stories like *Leaving the Yellow House* or *Theft*, we see how desire exposes character; it’s never just about pleasure, always about revelation.
And finally, there’s **death**—not as horror but as a clarifying lens. Bellow once said that the awareness of death “teaches us to see the living world with fresh eyes.” His late stories live by that creed. Every goodbye, every loss, becomes a chance to rediscover tenderness. Even the dying characters crack jokes, because laughter is the only defiance left.
What makes Bellow’s short fiction endure is not plot but presence. Each narrator, each consciousness, is so alive that even their digressions feel essential. He once wrote that the novelist’s task is “to show how things look to the human soul in its perplexity.” In *Collected Stories*, that mission extends to the short form. Whether he’s describing a Chicago street corner or a lover’s quarrel, Bellow insists on the complexity of perception. He refuses simplification. His people are never merely victims or villains; they are contradictions in motion.
There’s also a distinctly Jewish moral register running through these stories—not in a doctrinal sense, but in their attention to guilt, mercy, and the burden of history. Bellow’s Judaism is cultural, existential, comic. His characters carry the memory of exile not as piety but as irony. They question everything, including God, but never abandon the search for meaning. In this sense, Bellow’s fiction feels like a dialogue between the Talmud and the jazz club, between ancient argument and American improvisation.
Janis Bellow’s role as editor deserves mention. She organizes the stories chronologically, allowing readers to trace Bellow’s stylistic metamorphosis. Her introduction provides context without sentimentality; she understands that Bellow’s greatness lies not only in what he wrote but in how he made language itself a moral act. The collection’s curation feels organic—neither hagiographic nor academic. It’s as if she’s saying: here is the man as he sounded at different hours of his life.
To read *Collected Stories* today, in an age of irony and algorithms, is almost shocking. Bellow demands slow reading. His syntax won’t let you skim. You find yourself rereading sentences just to savor the music. And the reward is immense. These stories remind you that fiction is not escapism—it’s confrontation. You confront loneliness, absurdity, vanity, hope. You confront yourself.
Yet for all their intellectual depth, Bellow’s stories remain emotionally immediate. His people talk the way we think: with interruptions, contradictions, sudden insights. The result is prose that feels alive, breathing. Even his metaphors seem to shrug and gesture like real people. When Bellow describes a face “as sad as a burnt kettle,” you don’t analyze it—you feel it.
Reading him also restores faith in the idea of the *writer as moral witness*. Bellow does not preach, but he believes in the possibility of moral awareness. His protagonists are often failures, but they fail beautifully—because they never stop reflecting. In a culture that prizes certainty, Bellow’s ambiguity feels bracingly honest.
The shadow of Bellow’s short fiction extends across American literature. You can hear echoes of his rhythm in Philip Roth’s *Goodbye, Columbus*, in Cynthia Ozick’s moral wit, in Don DeLillo’s urban lyricism. Even David Foster Wallace, in his mixture of erudition and self-mockery, owes something to Bellow’s tone. Yet no one quite matches his blend of street talk and metaphysics. He wrote as if Dostoevsky had been reborn in Chicago with a jazz sax in hand.
*Collected Stories* also reasserts the short story as a testing ground for big ideas. Bellow shows that you don’t need 400 pages to dramatize the soul’s battle with the modern world. You can do it in twenty, if your sentences burn hot enough.
When you close *Collected Stories*, you feel both exhausted and enlarged. Exhausted because Bellow’s prose demands your full attention; enlarged because it rewards that attention with moral clarity. His stories remind us that intelligence, humor, and compassion are not opposites—they are different registers of the same human music.
Bellow once described art as “the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.” That’s exactly what these stories accomplish. Amid all the noise of ambition and alienation, they offer moments of quiet recognition—the sudden awareness that, yes, this is what it feels like to be human.
In an era where fiction often trades moral depth for cleverness, *Collected Stories* stands as proof that the old virtues—sympathy, curiosity, wonder—still matter. Saul Bellow never stopped believing in the grandeur of the human soul, even when that soul was trapped in the most ridiculous circumstances. That faith, expressed through laughter and lament, makes these stories timeless.
August 12, 2018
Masterful. So dense yet captivating. Almost all the stories are close to novella-length, something he adroitly addresses in the epilogue. Giving my ragged copy to my students and ordered a hardcover for my home library.
October 9, 2007
کمتر داستانی از "سال بلو" هست که در آن یک یا چند شخصیت "شکست خورده" و "بازنده" نباشند. اما بازندگان بلو کمتر به خط پایان و ناامیدی رسیده اند. آنها باخته اند، تا داستان خود را بگویند، برای آنها که ممکن است روزی ببازند!
Seems Bellow has gatherd a bunch of "failures" ...looks close to James...
Seems Bellow has gatherd a bunch of "failures" ...looks close to James...
June 30, 2007
An exercise in extremely long-winded pretension. I managed to finish it, but I will read nothing else by Saul Bellow at anything short of gunpoint.
February 4, 2017
It took my a while to get through this collection, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Wonderful character development.
Read
March 10, 2024really really cool and sharp and very funny too. great introduction to becoming a bellow guy
May 21, 2008
Kept me company on the bus in Chicago every morning during the long winter commutes.
October 25, 2020
Still reading but as per usual with story collections I am going to review as I read them
The set starts with “ By the St Lawrence “. An older Jewish man visits his hometown of Lachine, Montreal. While there he is flooded with memories of his youth, especially his family, Uncles and cousins he has long thought of. Interesting little aside the character mentions he should have started a business where for a fee a person can sing you a lyric and you will tell him the rest of the song. Google, as it were, long before Google was a possibility
“ A Silver Dish “ is a heavily anthologized story in which a man recalls his relationship with his maddening, prickly, Father which ends with him crawling, in his struggling to the last moment of his life, into his hospital bed to hold him until he feels him die in his arms
“ The Bellarosa Connection “ is a long, novella length story that has a successful Jewish man recalling his long standing relationship with a cousin of sorts. Actually a nephew of his Father’s second wife, the man named Harry Fonstein had escaped Germany and lost most of his family. His wife , described as mountainous, but clearly respected by our narrator is described as a tiger wife. Bellow seems to be fairly prescient in his thoughts and terms at times
“ The Old System “ is a strong story in which we follow the story of four siblings, three sins and daughters of Jewish immigrants from Russia. Narrated by a cousin in his own later years, remembering them after their death. The anger and hurt between them over money when in the end, in this large universe in which each individual means so little he wonders why
“ A Theft “ is another novella length piece in which we read the story of Clara, an Indiana farm girl that goes to Cambridge and Columbia, attempts suicide twice, has one lifelong love she never marries, three bad husbands, and then a fourth which gives her three children. The symbol, the talisman of her life is an emerald ring her first love gave her. List and found it disappears again when her child’s Austrian nanny brings her boyfriend into the house. This leads to a situation that becomes hard to untangle
“ Looking for Mr. Green” In this story we follow a relief worker ( himself a former professor of Latin ) in Depression era Chicago delivering checks to those who cannot pick them up. One would thing it would be easy to find people to give them money. One would be wrong.
“ Cousins “ is a story narrated by a low level legal tv show celebrity in Chicago. He has been asked by a cousin to write a letter on his behalf to a judge to reduce his sentence for gangster activities. This one was too long and lost me
“ Zetland: By a Character Witness “ has a man tell the story of the title character. Groomed to be a genius he is from a young age but when he goes to college in New York City the dreams of his Father drift away when his own worldview changes
“ Leaving the Yellow House “ works well. An elderly woman who has lived in the West for many years has reached a crossroads. Her neighbors don’t think she should live by herself any longer. But she has no where to go. What she really wants is for everything to stay the way it is. I related especially to her feelings about an injury she incurs that won’t heal, making it life changing. She retraces the steps that led to it and feels such remorse, anger and powerlessness. I fell in a freak accident and tore up my knee, broke my arm and more and I don’t think I will ever gain full functionality. It is just as she describes it in terms of frustration
By this point, I have to admit, my patience is running low on these stories. Bellow, I’m afraid, has to be added to the list of great writers ( Pynchon, Joyce, DFW, ) that I cannot make me level of enjoyment reach their reputation
Still, the last story, “ Something to Remember Me By “ does work well for what is. A ribald tale of a young man in Depression era Chicago who while delivering flowers one afternoon gets rolled by a hooker and has to make his way home on the trolley wearing women’s clothes is worth a few laughs at least.
The set starts with “ By the St Lawrence “. An older Jewish man visits his hometown of Lachine, Montreal. While there he is flooded with memories of his youth, especially his family, Uncles and cousins he has long thought of. Interesting little aside the character mentions he should have started a business where for a fee a person can sing you a lyric and you will tell him the rest of the song. Google, as it were, long before Google was a possibility
“ A Silver Dish “ is a heavily anthologized story in which a man recalls his relationship with his maddening, prickly, Father which ends with him crawling, in his struggling to the last moment of his life, into his hospital bed to hold him until he feels him die in his arms
“ The Bellarosa Connection “ is a long, novella length story that has a successful Jewish man recalling his long standing relationship with a cousin of sorts. Actually a nephew of his Father’s second wife, the man named Harry Fonstein had escaped Germany and lost most of his family. His wife , described as mountainous, but clearly respected by our narrator is described as a tiger wife. Bellow seems to be fairly prescient in his thoughts and terms at times
“ The Old System “ is a strong story in which we follow the story of four siblings, three sins and daughters of Jewish immigrants from Russia. Narrated by a cousin in his own later years, remembering them after their death. The anger and hurt between them over money when in the end, in this large universe in which each individual means so little he wonders why
“ A Theft “ is another novella length piece in which we read the story of Clara, an Indiana farm girl that goes to Cambridge and Columbia, attempts suicide twice, has one lifelong love she never marries, three bad husbands, and then a fourth which gives her three children. The symbol, the talisman of her life is an emerald ring her first love gave her. List and found it disappears again when her child’s Austrian nanny brings her boyfriend into the house. This leads to a situation that becomes hard to untangle
“ Looking for Mr. Green” In this story we follow a relief worker ( himself a former professor of Latin ) in Depression era Chicago delivering checks to those who cannot pick them up. One would thing it would be easy to find people to give them money. One would be wrong.
“ Cousins “ is a story narrated by a low level legal tv show celebrity in Chicago. He has been asked by a cousin to write a letter on his behalf to a judge to reduce his sentence for gangster activities. This one was too long and lost me
“ Zetland: By a Character Witness “ has a man tell the story of the title character. Groomed to be a genius he is from a young age but when he goes to college in New York City the dreams of his Father drift away when his own worldview changes
“ Leaving the Yellow House “ works well. An elderly woman who has lived in the West for many years has reached a crossroads. Her neighbors don’t think she should live by herself any longer. But she has no where to go. What she really wants is for everything to stay the way it is. I related especially to her feelings about an injury she incurs that won’t heal, making it life changing. She retraces the steps that led to it and feels such remorse, anger and powerlessness. I fell in a freak accident and tore up my knee, broke my arm and more and I don’t think I will ever gain full functionality. It is just as she describes it in terms of frustration
By this point, I have to admit, my patience is running low on these stories. Bellow, I’m afraid, has to be added to the list of great writers ( Pynchon, Joyce, DFW, ) that I cannot make me level of enjoyment reach their reputation
Still, the last story, “ Something to Remember Me By “ does work well for what is. A ribald tale of a young man in Depression era Chicago who while delivering flowers one afternoon gets rolled by a hooker and has to make his way home on the trolley wearing women’s clothes is worth a few laughs at least.
July 4, 2017
The first half of this book had me on the outs. The first half of this book was, and I mean this in literal sense rather than figurative, not for me. It was (as I was to find out as I progressed) an unflinchingly, uncomfortably intimate picture of the 20th century Jewish-American experience. As a 25-year-old WASP-y Australian, as awed as I was by the prose, it was difficult to penetrate. It was difficult to immerse myself and take something comprehensible from what I was reading. I did start reading it somewhere around Chicago, at least.
At almost exactly the halfway point, the stories collected (by the author himself) immediately and thrillingly broaden their focus.
Everything from 'Looking for Mr. Green' onward is fucking incredible.'What Kind of Day Did You Have?" is possibly the finest short story I've ever read. Every character is gut-wrenchingly, terribly, miserably, human. Each plot, while gripping and page-turning, is so stunningly regular that it feels as if you may be reading over an account of one of your own memories that you forgot somewhere along the way.
These are episodes lifted straight from the modern human condition. Simultaneously a celebration and condemnation of the modern world and its people. Never before have I read an author that so deftly illustrates the uneasy and intricate web of relationships between an individual and their family, acquaintances, friends, colleagues, and even their city.
Bellow's writing makes you want to slap, spit, curse, scream, and exhale heavily in useless exasperation; but you never want to put it down. This is vital writing, is what I'm trying to say.
(4 stars because as frothy as I am over the second half, I really couldn't get into the first)
At almost exactly the halfway point, the stories collected (by the author himself) immediately and thrillingly broaden their focus.
Everything from 'Looking for Mr. Green' onward is fucking incredible.'What Kind of Day Did You Have?" is possibly the finest short story I've ever read. Every character is gut-wrenchingly, terribly, miserably, human. Each plot, while gripping and page-turning, is so stunningly regular that it feels as if you may be reading over an account of one of your own memories that you forgot somewhere along the way.
These are episodes lifted straight from the modern human condition. Simultaneously a celebration and condemnation of the modern world and its people. Never before have I read an author that so deftly illustrates the uneasy and intricate web of relationships between an individual and their family, acquaintances, friends, colleagues, and even their city.
Bellow's writing makes you want to slap, spit, curse, scream, and exhale heavily in useless exasperation; but you never want to put it down. This is vital writing, is what I'm trying to say.
(4 stars because as frothy as I am over the second half, I really couldn't get into the first)
September 14, 2019
Well crafted 20th Century writing. Just like him, based on New York Jewish people. He creates some quirky vivid characters, who I thought must surely be based on people he knew or met. In each tale, there is usually a clash of some sort between working-class and upper-class people and/or generations of a family or both. Sadly, I could not complete listening to all these stories because I canceled my Amazon audio subscription as it was not worth $16.99 per month and there weren't enough choices of the kinds of literature I prefer to read. However, I admit I read/listened to some books I normally would not read, so my reading paradigm was stretched a bit. Bellow is someone whose works I would have read, so reading/listening to a few of his tales gave me the pleasure of hearing aloud his crisp clear writing.
April 12, 2021
Unforgivably verbose, the majority of these stories are ruined by their unnecessary length and irrelevant detail. We forgive this more in novels, but in short stories it is inexcusably self-indulgent. Together with unfleshed-out characters and, with a couple of exceptions, a lack of emotional engagement, this collection that took 24 hours to read spread out over 6 days was a dull and unrewarding slog.
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