SECOND READING: 42Eileen Battersby revisits Saul Bellow's 1987 bestseller.
KENNETH, THE straight-talking narrator, is worried about his absent minded, increasingly restless uncle, even more worried than usual. For Kenneth, his uncle, Benn Crader, a botanist of world repute, who since the death of his beloved wife Lena some 15 years earlier has developed a messy addiction to women, is the most important person in his life. Our narrator loves his uncle so intensely that he abandoned his native Paris to live in the drab midwest.
Kenneth's father, an aging icon of glamour who adores Paris almost as much as it apparently idolises him, can't understand any of this. But he is not fretting. Kenneth, by his own description, tall, goofy and none too handsome, was never the son his father had expected.
Bellow, the 1976 Nobel Literature Laureate, one of the undisputed masters of 20th-century fiction, invariably brought the soul of a philosopher, the mind of a street hustler and the timing of a stand-up comic to his punchy, vivid narratives. This is an under-celebrated classic, sustained by some of the sharpest, most exasperated and profound dialogue even Bellow ever concocted: "I haven't got second sight, Ken: all I've got is savvy."
Dominated by talk; it is fast and funny and physical - laugh out loud, and then sigh some. The novel revolves on a single theme, that enduring Bellow thesis, that the cleverest people do the dumbest things in relationships: as Benn recalls telling a "newspaperman" who quizzed him about the increasing levels of radiation: "I think more people die of heartbreak."
Kenneth, who has his own problems in the form of a sexually alluring former girlfriend who has his child but openly prefers men who tend towards physical abuse, is desperately concerned about Benn's latest romantic escapade, a sudden secret marriage to Matilda, beautiful, if repellent thirtysomething, only child of the malevolently grasping Dr Layamon.
Benn has not yet fully recovered from the experience of one lonely woman whose insistence on having sex with him causes her to die of a heart attack in the middle of it. And then there was his last-minute escape from Caroline Bunge, a flamboyantly crazed millionaire, who had had the wedding planned. Loyal, faithful and impressively patient, Kenneth listens and tries to help. After all, who else but a devoted soulmate could possibly make sense of Benn? Kenneth is a fellow academic, though not a scientist. Kenneth's field is Russian literature. He left Paris to be closer to his uncle and also to pursue his scholarly interest - Petersburg, 1913.
The conversations are miracles; Bellow allows his feisty intellect to weave and parry literary references, art, history, politics, science, metaphysics, guilt and the ongoing chaos of sexual relations. The pages crackle with ideas and sensations as the bewildered central characters, Kenneth and Benn, attempt to make sense of life, their lives.
Considering their intense closeness, Kenneth is hurt to be informed of Benn's wedding only after the event. Bellow has created many convincing narrators but Kenneth is special - we share his panic. But Benn is not thoughtless; he is merely terrified of his new wife and her scary parents. His father-in-law is pushing him into reopening a court case against an ancient enemy, a Crader relative.
During a late-night phone call made by Benn to Kenneth from the laundry room of his bride's fancy new apartment, the full truth emerges; Benn, having reluctantly seen Psycho at Matilda's request, now realises she reminds him of the deranged killer in Hitchcock's movie. "I actually removed the phone from me," reports Kenneth, "and wondered how such a thing could come out of the earpiece."
Benn's fears become ever more detailed. Written when he was approaching 72, More Die of Heartbreakgraphically exposes what Bellow refers to in it as "the post human era".
All the linguistic fluency, wit, energy and shrewd understanding of exactly how many banana skins each of us is capable of skidding on lives and breathes in a timeless manic extravaganza of breathtaking range.