Good-bye, maestro

Saul Bellow, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century, died yesterday at the age of 89.

The NYT obituary was appropriately reverential and humorous, as the master was. He lived a good life, churning out novel after fantastic novel. The only tragedy is that so few kids my age still read his novels. In homage to my icon I am going to issue a blanket pronouncement that anyone who hasn't read The Adventures of Augie March has no right to call themselves a reader of American novels. (Fuck the Norman Mailer quote about it; Saul's belches were more eloquent and descriptive of humanity than any of Norm's novels.)

I especially like this from the NYT:

The center of his fictional universe was Chicago, where he grew up and spent most of his life, and which he made into the first city of American letters.

First city indeed -- take that New York City!

"The children of Chicago bakers, tailors, peddlers, insurance agents, pressers, cutters, grocers, the sons of families on relief, were reading buckram-bound books from the public library and were in a state of enthusiasm, having found themselves on the shore of a novelistic land to which they really belonged, discovering their birthright ... talking to one another about the mind, society, art, religion, epistemology and doing all this in Chicago, of all places."

Sadly, those days are long gone, now that only 1 out of 1,000 children of any class are less likely to be seen with a Sony PPS than a Russian novel. (And those odds are generous.) Other bits from the obituary I especially appreciated:

He spoke his own mind, without regard for political correctness or fashion, and was often involved, at least at a literary distance, in fierce debates with feminists, black writers, postmodernists.

While others were ready to proclaim the death of the novel, he continued to think of it as a vital form. "I never tire of reading the master novelists," he said. "Can anything as vivid as the characters in their books be dead?"

And on wining the Nobel Prize:

"The child in me is delighted," he said. "The adult in me is skeptical." He took the award, he said, "on an even keel," aware of "the secret humiliation" that "some of the very great writers of the century didn't get it."

You will be missed. Philip Roth, please hang in there for another decade!