Saul Bellow

Moses Herzog, a middle-aged academic whose second wife Madeleine has left him for his closest friend Valentine Gersbach, is coming apart. He writes letters compulsively — to friends, to his dead mother, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Eisenhower, God — and never sends them. The novel moves between his present, drifting between New York, a decaying country house in the Berkshires, and Chicago, and his memories of an immigrant Montreal childhood, his failed scholarly book on Romanticism, and the marriage's collapse. In Chicago he takes his father's old pistol, intending to kill Gersbach, and watches through a window as the man gently bathes Herzog's small daughter; he leaves without acting. Arrested after a car accident, released, he retreats to the country house and, at the end, finds he has no more messages for anyone.

The unsent letters are the formal device that lets Bellow put the whole intellectual apparatus of the century — Romanticism, existentialism, mass society theory — inside a domestic story about a man whose wife has left him, and the comedy comes from the mismatch. His prose mixes high philosophical diction with Yiddish-inflected Chicago street speech in the same sentence, a synthesis that changed the register available to American fiction. Herzog's crisis is with what he calls the wasteland outlook, the fashionable modernist despair he can no longer accept, and the novel's argument is a defence of ordinary attachment against intellectual nihilism — a position that is also why later criticism has read Bellow's women characters as thinly drawn instruments of male self-examination.