Dangling novels: why Saul Bellow's opinions are beside the point

Ellis Sharp begins a note on the late Saul Bellow by admitting that he prefers Norman Mailer. Despite their differences, they had things in common, he says. This pricked my interest as I’ve not read Mailer beyond the first embarrassing pages of Ancient Evenings, and wondered what they were. But it seems they similarities of political development.

Sharp despises Bellow’s political opinions in later life. So do I. But these have little to do with the novels. Do we talk about Dostoevsky’s novels only in relation to the fact that he was a virulent anti-Semite and anti-Catholic and also hated Muslims and Turks? No, of course not. These are more or less forgotten. It’s still shocking of course, as are Bellow’s opinions as revealed in To Jerusalem and Back, but they are in marked contrast to the experience of reading the novels; his and Dostoevsky's.

What makes Dostoevsky a great novelist, and what make Bellow a great novelist too, is that he placed various antagonistic attitudes and opinions in relation to each other, that is in dialogue with each other. Bakhtin brought this out rather a long while ago.

The critics can go on about the energy of Bellow’s prose, its biblical cadences, and the great, piercing comedy of it all, but what makes Bellow great does not require such things, just as energy, beauty and comedy doesn’t guarantee it (fans of Martin Amis please note).

It is a mark of the limitations of current popular literary criticism that the obituaries speak only of such confections, wrongheaded ancestry and extra-literary politics.