Saul Bellow

Sorry for the radio silence, team. I've been knee-deep in Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow's hulking, sprawling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the intellectual life. 

But I've finished it now (I've finished it!), and I must say, it feels good. Because this is no small book, and making one's way through takes time, some serious time. 

Let me say at the start that Humboldt is a very fine book; in fact, I think it's the best book Bellow could or did write. In its scope, its ferocity, and reach, it's Bellow's strongest and most perceptive work. It's a tidal wave of intellect, an unyielding pursuit of life's divergent philosophies. 

Of course, there's an intensity to Bellow's narration: it comes fast and furious, and Charlie Citrine, his main character and foil, is everything I imagine Bellow to have been: cerebral, charming, intimidating (but clumsy in a way, too). Citrine is nothing else if not the Modern Intellectual, emblematic of Chicago's thinking classes, reaching at all moments for a greater sense of meaning. 

But Humboldt is about more than intellectual sub-currents; it's a book preoccupied with ideas of the soul, the afterlife, and inheritance. Humboldt's gift (which I won't reveal) is very much in keeping with these themes: as the dead poet, Humboldt, reaches from beyond the grave, bestowing on Citrine a peculiar inheritance, his soul's at work, and it's as if Bellow's arguing that all of us, regardless of the caste we occupy, generate some sort of posthumous momentum; we resonate, even after we're gone.

I'm not sure I agree with Bellow on everything he has to say about the soul (and he has a lot to say, trust me). But that's no reason to discount the book, because for a novel defined by its enormity, Humboldt is also guided by a delicacy. Bellow's narrative - with innate sensitivity - charts the impossible divide between intellectualism and emotion, between critical thought and the passive unraveling of events. It's one of Citrine's many lovers who encourages him to return to a more natural condition, to one characterized, she says, by the "fundamentals of feeling." Crossing that chasm is the work of this book. 

It's clear that Humboldt's Gift could have lasted forever - and in a sense, it did, it does. Charlie Citrine is a man for whom days are less the aggregate of events and more the sum of the thoughts those events engendered. It's exhausting living this way, but it's exhilarating, too. And that, in its own way, was Bellow's most profound gift to us.