delillo on bellow

Their names share four letters, split between vowels and consonants, and now Delillo has won a PEN award in the more ashen man's name. For lifetime achievement defined by quantity of good to great novels, could there be a post-war American writer greater than these two? Don't give me Roth and don't tell me Bellow isn't only post-war.

Delillo I've read: Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street, Ratner's Star, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, and Cosmopolis. (I think that's it.) I've also read Delillo's somewhat famous essay on 9/11 as well as a short story or two.

Bellow I've read: Seize the Day, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, The Dean's December, Ravelstein, and perhaps a short story or two. A short piece by Bellow I like is his introduction to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, where, to me, he makes it clear that he does not necessarily see things the same way. I'm not sure that the university is still a place where people with even strongly opposing political views might support each other's work or at least respect its place in print. (Well, I guess these days everyone is too busy with their teaching overloads, publication schedules, and "specializations" to read each other's work. And that would more likely be online, yes, indeed.)

OK. In conclusion, I've read more Delillo than Bellow (and I'm willing to wager that you have too) although Bellow would seem to be a more significant influence in my own literary efforts, if either of these guys is any kind of influence at all. (Well, I guess you can't have an alienated male protagonist or antihero in an American novel without implicitly referencing these two.) I've tried to describe Fight for Your Long Day as a cross between novels by Saul Bellow and Dan Fante, but I'm not sure it would be understood that way, and I doubt many of my readers will have read much by those two anyway. (This does not imply I have "many readers" as of this blogging.) I'd probably be better off comparing it to movies. . . ah, humanity.

As an aside on Italian American novelists, I should note that for me, Don Delillo completely kicks Richard Russo's ass--although Russo is said to be a wonderful person, and Straight Man is fun--and is the undisputed lone heavyweight in the category although Dan and John Fante would be my sentimental favorites on this list and I'm pulling for Dan Fante's buddy Mark SaFranko (who was kind enough to let me know soon after this post that in fact he is not Italian; okay, we'll handle that another time but keep his name under the bright lights of USK) as well as two of the guys Dan Cafaro has signed up for publication at Atticus Books. Maybe we'll Jew-list another day. Oy vey.

(Mark's correction just reminded me of a thought I had on the way to the library. Saul Bellow was born in Quebec.)

UPDATE 03/04/2023: Only this past summer, I read Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, and at some point after I wrote this blog entry, I read The Adventures of Augie March.

The Adventures of Augie March

Before I drove up to Philly, in bed but awake at 7 a.m., I shoved down the last ten pages of The Adventures of Augie March, and I can tell you the last word was America even if it would be ridiculous to suggest this novel could be the last word on America.

In fact, it's not, and although I know that from reading James Atlas's biography and other sources, Bellow ended his life in favor of Augie's active spirit as opposed to the hopelessness and fatalism of the much shorter Seize the Day, it still seems that you don't have to live through the Great Depression or the current situation to recognize that by the numbers, the protagonist's life in Seize the Day much more accurately depicts life for many more Americans than the adventures of Augie. (Still, we could consider that's not the point at all, and that while both inform, it is Augie March that better entertains.)

And for the slim majority of Americans that do live their whole lives floating well above surface, housing and health benefits intact, etc--well, their adventures are not often with gigantic eagles, gamblers, thinkers, and Russian revolutionaries on the run, but rather, exist on planned vacations and shopping and HDTV where some other fellow is ramming his head into an incredible hulk of a defensive line.

As for the book itself, similar to Ravelstein, my interest waned when Bellow took his protagonist South of the border. Save for the Trotsky section in Mexico, I found most of the writing much more exciting when Augie was in America, Chicago for the most part, but not exclusively. I can't say why that it is, and it could surely be coincidence.

I can see why Bellow's friends and admirers were downright angry at the Atlas biography, and yet, frankly, it was good, easy reading, and in some ways, to me, the man's life was more interesting than his prose.

Another favorite nonfiction concerning Bellow is the chapter included in Brent Staples's Parallel Time, which although seemingly based upon a misreading or incomplete reading of Mr Sammler's Planet offers a great chase scene and is still fascinating in the way it brings perspective to the circumstances in which the canonical writer was living at University of Chicago in the late sixties and early seventies. I highly encourage a read of Staples's book concurrent with Sammler.

Bellow did come through with many great quotable sections of Augie, and I'll leave you with this one (for clarity, in short-quote format--with quotation marks, period in the wrong place, but alas, no identifying tag because I have no colon on this netbook and I just drove myself mad pasting in all the periods!--not because I'd want any of you to ignore MLA format for long quotations).

"Take the fact that people generally were full of loathing and it cost them an effort to look at one another. Mostly they wanted to be left alone. And they dug for unreality more than for treasure, unreality being their last great hope because then they could doubt that what they knew about themselves was true" (482).

And as we do, we move on, and now I'm reading number 197 of The Paris Review (great interviews with Samuel Delany and William Gibson, photography, and the next section of an early "lost" Bolano novel) and John Fante's Dreams from Bunker Hill.

draft in progress: over a hundred favorite novels (and novellas) not in order

      A Fan's Notes by Fred Exley

      The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Brothers Karamazov by F.D.

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

Chump Change by Dan Fante

The Sell-Out by Paul Beatty

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner

Light in August by William Faulkner

Hunger by Knut Hamsun 

Candide by Voltaire

Lolita by Nabokov

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin

War Trash by Ha Jin

The Joke by Milan Kundera

Petersburg by Andrei Biely

Envy by Yuri Olesha

Native Son by Richard Wright

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

2666 by Robert Bolano

Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

The Music of Chance by Paul Auster

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Americana by Don DeLillo

End Zone by Don DeLillo

Libra by Don DeLillo

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

The Ghostwriter by Philip Roth

I Married a Communist by Philip Roth

Caucasia by Danzy Senna

Native Speaker by Chang Rae Lee

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Too Late the Phalarope by Alan Paton

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner

Water Music by T. C. Boyle

World's End by T.C. Boyle

Budding Prospects by T.C. Boyle

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins

Another Roadside Attaction by Tom Robbins

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Nun by Denis Diderot

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Television by Jean-Phillippe Toussaint

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Revulsion by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Zone by Mathias Enard

Journey to the End of Night by Celine

Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante

Ask the Dust by John Fante

The Brotherhood of the Grape by John Fante

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Correction by Thomas Bernhard

Extinction by Thomas Bernhard

Camera by Jean-Phlippe Toussaint

The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Concrete by Thomas Bernhard

Immortality by Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Confessions of a Lady Killer by George Stade

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Independence Day by Richard Ford

The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford

The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

Memory of Departure by Abdulzarak Gurnah

Afterlives by Abdulzarak Gurnah

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames

The Extra Man by Jonathan Ames

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

Shame by Salman Rushdie 

I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabel

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel

Firmin by Sam Savage

Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt

The Seven Madmen and the Flamethrowers by Roberto Arlt 

V by Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Benito Cereno by Herman Melville

Crime and Punishment by F. D.

The Possessed (Demons or The Devils) by F. D.

A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Washington Square by Henry James

Sula by Toni Morrison

Their Eyes Were Watching God

A Separate Peace

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rølvaag

Run Me To Earth by Paul Yoon

White Mythology by W.D. Clarke

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

The Story of My Wife by Milan Fust

The Incorporation of Eric Chung by Steven C. Lo

Straight Man by Richard Russo

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

Hating Olivia by Mark SaFranko

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera

Auggie's Revenge by Alex Kudera

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

A Passage to India by E. M. Forrester

All Quiet on the Western Front by E. Remarque

The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Roughing It by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

Bellow short stack

Saul Bellow published 100 years ago this month: http://t.co/D1ufz2rzBh #Birth of the #Writer

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) June 4, 2015

3 favorite Saul Bellow characters or scenes 1) Ravelstein watching Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls 2) Sammler observing, famously & 1/2

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) June 4, 2015

3) Saul Bellow's depiction in Humboldt's Gift of Delmore Schwartz as "the first poet with power brakes"; fav prose, opening para. of Herzog.

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) June 4, 2015

Mr. Sammler's Planet

"It's true that I didn't like your review of Sammler. I didn't dislike it more than other pieces of yours, but I disliked it. It appeared more than a year after publication of the book and I had heard that an earlier and more friendly review had been rejected by the editors, but knowing what gossip is, I did not take this to be fact. It was the conclusion of your piece—"God lives!"—that offended me. You meant evidently that I was a megalomaniac. But this didn't seem to me to be literary criticism."

~~ Saul Bellow to Alfred Kazin, March 20, 1974

26 fictions and 3 memoirs that stayed with me (and then more than 9 others)

(For my favorite novels and short story collections, I limited myself to fiction but cheated so I could add Richard Wright's Black Boy and Iain Levison's A Working Stiff's Manifesto. I listed no more than one work per author.)

1) A Fan's Notes by Fred Exley
2) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
3) Brothers Karamazov by F.D.
4) Chump Change by Dan Fante
5) Like Life by Lorrie Moore
6) Moby-Dick by H. Melville
7) Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
8) Hunger by Knut Hamsun 
9) Candide by Voltaire
10) Lolita by Nabokov
11) Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
12) The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
13) The Bridegroom and Other Stories by Ha Jin
14) The Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee
15) A Working Stiff's Manifesto by Iain Levison 
16) The Joke by Milan Kundera
17) Petersburg by Andrei Biely
18) Envy by Yuri Olesha
19) Black Boy by Richard Wright
20) Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

and then I thought of some more (and cheated more with memoirs, Offutt and Pham):

21) The Music of Chance by Paul Auster
22) White Noise by Don DeLillo
23) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
24) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
25) Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow
26) The Same River Twice by Chris Offutt
27) Catfish and Mandala by Alexander X. Pham
28) Caucasia by Danzy Senna
29) Native Speaker by Chang Rae Lee

And because this is such a highly professional blog, I'll come back later and add some links.

30) Hard Times by Charles Dickens
31) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
32) The Cliff Walk by Don J. Snyder
33) The Human Stain by Philip Roth
34) Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner
35) Water Music by T. C. Boyle
36) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
37) Television by Jean-Phillippe Toussaint

and saving the best for last

38) The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano although Last Evenings on Earth is an extremely close second for me

Until I remembered to also include these:

39) Selected Stories by Andre Dubus
40) The Overcoat and Other Tales by Nikolai Gogol
41) Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
42) The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

So with that final four, until I remember others, I still kind of have a saving-the-best-for-last thing going on.

Feel free to find me at Goodreads for star ratings and a few reviews.

A fine final correction would be

43) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Okay, then, until I add more. . .

44) Revulsion by Horacio Castellanos Moya
45) Zone by Mathias Enard
46) Journey to the End of Night by Celine
47) Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski
48) Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante
49) Outline by Rachel Cusk
50) Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
51) Correction by Thomas Bernhard
52) The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories by Franz Kafka
53) Confessions of a Lady Killer by George Stade
54) Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
55) Independence Day by Richard Ford
56) The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley
57) Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

58) Memory of Departure by Abdulzarak Gurnah

There were others I should have added, and then new ones appeared.

59) Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

60) Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

61) Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames

Note: I do not see W. G. Sebald above, and I believe that I doubted it fit into categories such as "the novel," "fiction," or "memoir," so below I am adding it with other favorite titles that might not easily fit although I'm not ready to add Thucydides, Foucault, Nietzsche, and so on.

62) The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

63) The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

64) A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

65) Shame by Salman Rushdie 

66) I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabel

67) Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt