Getting a handle on Saul Bellow …

… James Wolcott reviews ‘The Life of Saul Bellow’ by Zachary Leader — LRB 24 January 2019. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As monumental as Leader’s investigation is, with its copious documentation and minute reconstruction of such a long, labyrinthine lifespan (just keeping track of the zigzag traffic of Bellow’s girlfriends must have made him dizzy), his manner and approach are modest and self-effacing; his personal piques and objections to Bellow’s personal and professional misdemeanours are mostly kept in a diplomatic pouch, in marked contrast to Atlas’s snorty exasperations. He endeavours to be judiciously fair. But although Leader has avoided Atlas’s egregious attitudinising, he runs afoul of several hazards that bog him and the impatient reader (me, pumping the accelerator) in extensive tracts of whichy thickets. Leader might have profited from heeding a couple of cautionary flags that were raised by someone in the know.