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“... This is the first comprehensive biography of Saul Bellow and the first to receive his co-operation over the complete, ten-year span of its writing. The author, James Atlas, whose biography of Delmore Schwartz appeared in 1977 and who is the general editor of the Penguin Lives Series, was given full access to Bellow’s letters and unpublished manuscripts and final permission to quote all the passages he wanted to use ...”

“... at the restrictions of his past; he writes well about the ‘rigid madness of the Orthodox’ that Saul Bellow has described, the rules that restrain ‘haughty, spinning, crazy spirit’. Charles Morton Luger, high-flying financial analyst and ‘Christian non-believer’, has an epiphany in the opening paragraph of The Gilgul of Park Avenue’. Not a ...”

“... There are allusions in this new selection of his television criticism to Walter Pater, Keats, Saul Bellow and John Donne – consorting with boisterous jokes about the crushed budgerigars composing J.R.’s hatband. James goes as far as it is possible to go towards miscegenating Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and The John Curry Spectacular. Even he cannot ...”

“... enemies, coming back to them obsessively. Worst of all the New York crowd was Alfred Kazin – ‘Saul Bellow called him the conductor on the gravy train. Wherever they were passing out money, honour, position, awards – there was Kazin. I didn’t read his memoirs. Well – I did read A Walker in the City, but not the last volume. He’s rewriting his ...”

“... playmate.) Thirlwell’s narrator, in other words, badly wants to be the kind of novelist – Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Mann are among those he quotes, according to the postscript – who could make Literature out of the thin delusions of a reprobate like Haffner. Unless, of course, it is Thirlwell who wants to be that novelist, in ...”

“... else. He spent his life envious of the idle, effortless, self-delighting genius (or so he imagined Saul Bellow) and those with better educations and more refined childhoods. Growing up, he told the Paris Review, ‘there were no books that I remember in the house, no records, music, pictures on the wall. On Sundays I listened to somebody’s piano through ...”

“... nurtured reputation for toughness, I have known him only as a good and gentle friend’), Saul Bellow and Adam Bellow: ‘The long walks we took together taught me a good deal about what it means to be the son of a well-known writer, and what it doesn’t mean.’ All this is refreshingly dippy, and as an ...”

“... modern canon … I craved academic and hipster respect of the kind that Pynchon and Gaddis got and Saul Bellow and Ann Beattie didn’t. But Bellow and Beattie, not to mention Dickens and Conrad and Brontë and Dostoevsky and Christina Stead, were the writers I actually, unhiply enjoyed reading.’ More and more ‘the ...”

“... that the date ‘was the 8th or the 15th of January, 1939’. Frobisher was a dangling man before Saul Bellow invented the title, happily married but still yearning for a girl met at the Institute of Mystical Science, a sceptic in most things but a believer in astrology and ghosts. Footnotes are provided for verisimilitude, there are pub discussions in ...”

“... is ‘obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow’. My own reservations lie not with the superlatives, but with the implicit grounds for comparison. If Fox is, in Franzen’s phrase, ‘inarguably great’ – and I believe she is – it isn’t because, for example, she does a better job of ...”

“... falling out of their East Hampton hammocks signing up biographies of high-profile authors such as Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer (three thus far, along with a memoir by one of his former wives, with other exes waiting in the wings to take their whacks). The irony is that publishers seem more eager to bring out books about golden-oldie ...”

“... of American life. They bear a familial resemblance to Dangling Man and The Victim (the novels Saul Bellow wrote before the urban immigrant outpouring of Augie March) and to Barbary Shore and The Deer Park (the novels Norman Mailer wrote between his initial success with the more conventional war novel The Naked and the Dead and his emergence as a ...”

“... Western man. The writing has that fish-in-water faculty of being able to do anything. Unlike Saul Bellow, with his epigrams and mandarin manner, Updike can be high or demotic as mood or requirement takes him. It gives him the power to devastate, as here on Reagan and Bush: ‘at least he was dignified, and had that dream distance; the powerful thing ...”

“... and have such affection for vagaries and wrinkles – ‘preserving especially’, as he says of Saul Bellow, ‘what is going on at the times when nothing is going ...”

“... But then Updike, it is also said, is not quite a highbrow novelist – not in the sense that, say, Saul Bellow might believe himself to be, or even Gore Vidal. Vidal, all too predictably, sneers at Updike as a middlebrow provincial, by which he seems to mean that Updike timorously fails to stride forward as a global sage, or as a ‘custodian’ of ...”