Geoff Wisner

A Theft

by Saul Bellow. Penguin Books, 109 pages.

Saul Bellow's style is a more delicate instrument than it seems at first, and when it gets out of tune it can suddenly sound all wrong. In Bellow's early career, the buttoned-down prose of Dangling Man and The Victim gave way to the damburst of The Adventures of Augie March, a great, sprawling, crowded, picaresque novel in which Bellow first showed what bumptious energy could be generated by yoking high and low language together. But it was not until later novels like Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet that Bellow demonstrated the depth of emotion and subtleties of character that he could render with that approach.

"If I am out of my mind it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog." The first line of that novel, with its heavy hurrying gait, already expresses some of Herzog's character -- clumsy, blurting, impetuous, baffled by a hostile world like a baited bear. Character has always been Bellow's strongest suit, and it sometimes seems that the most successful of his books -- Seize the Day, Herzog, the underrated Dean's December -- have the least in the way of structured plot. The more plot there is, as in Humboldt's Gift, the more out of control and preposterous it tends to become.

Clara Velde, unlike most Bellow protagonists, is neither male nor Jewish, and the reach required to create her in the depth required by Bellow's close-focus approach may have been too much. Raised in the "backwoods" of Indiana, she has become a "czarina" of the fashion world, and Bellow insists on her double nature: "In a sophisticated boardroom Clara could be as plain as cornmeal mush, and in such a mood, when she opened her mouth, you couldn't guess whether she would speak or blow bubble gum." Bellow sketches in her background with the kind of hazy approximateness that annoyed Cynthia Ozick about Updike's Henry Bech. "Her father owned small department stores in southern Indiana," we are told, but references to "the sticks," "the backcountry look," "one-room schoolhouses," and even "pioneer women" seem to equate middle-class Indiana with the howling wilderness.

The great love of Clara's life is Ithiel Regler, a high-powered international consultant, and to judge from the chummy references to Haig and Kissinger, a fairly conservative one. Once a "wunderkind in nuclear strategy," he appears on talk shows, testifies in Congress, and helps the Italian police track terrorists. What else can we expect from a man whose name means "God is with me"? In Clara's view, which we're given no reason to doubt, Ithiel is a genius and overpoweringly sexy, but we must take this on faith, as we are given little more about him than pronouncements like, "That's my argument with psychiatry: it encourages you to build on abuses and keeps you infantile." (Clara herself is capable of wild pronouncements of her own, as when she says, "It's conceivable that the world-spirit gets into mere girls and makes them its demon-interpreters.")

A Theft is about the emerald ring that Clara once made Ithiel buy for her; about its significance to her as a symbol of their love, even as both of them go from one failed marriage to the next; about her losing it, collecting the insurance, then finding it again; about how the ring is then stolen; and about how in recovering it once again she gains a deeper understanding of herself, and of what the ring means to her.

Such a theme seems better suited to Maupassant or Henry James than to Bellow, and that may be much of the problem. Bellow's More Die of Heartbreak had a Jamesian subject too; like The Portrait of a Lady, it was about the way a naive soul can be exploited in the wrong kind of marriage. But where the provincial vulnerability of Isabel Archer made her plight tragic, the situation of Benn Crader, world-famous botanist, was merely ridiculous and pathetic, since he had gotten into his fix through his own absent-minded unwillingness to look at his situation squarely. In A Theft, the Jamesian subject is coupled with a Jamesian indirection that can be maddening.

Like Seize the Day, A Theft is set in New York City, or "Gogmagogsville," as Clara repeatedly refers to it, but the city is described only in terms of the insides of hotels and apartment buildings. Clara comes home to find that her Austrian au pair has thrown a wild party, and that the girl's lover, a handsome Haitian named Frederic, is still there. Frederic, as it turns out, has Clara's ring in his pocket. But here, in the only scene in which Clara lays eyes on Frederic, she does not speak to him or even make eye contact. He is barely described. Yet Clara broods and speculates on him endlessly, as a symbol of the dangerous attractions that Gogmagogsville offers to young girls.

In Mr. Sammler's Planet, a black urban criminal was presented very differently. In the vividly described scene that opens the book, Sammler confronts a pickpocket whose strength, grace and style made him on one level admirable, and rendered the question of whether Sammler or Bellow himself might harbor racist attitudes almost beside the point. But the indirection and false notes with which similar material is handled in A Theft make such questions inescapable. "My husband and I are not rashists," Clara tells the au pair, fluffing the word as if nervous. She mentions that her company has divested from South Africa, and makes a mental note to ask Ithiel his opinion of divestiture. (It hardly seems necessary; he'll be against it.)

A Theft does have some of the wit and pungency that we read Bellow for. The cleaning woman, Clara thinks, "was an honest lady, according to her lights, but there probably were certain corners into which those lights never were turned." We see the billionaire leftist Giangiacomo F. "going on about revolutionary insurgency" while his butler grates truffles. And the complacency of Clara's husband Wilder Velde is perceptively and humorously drawn. He enjoys keeping up with the doings of Clara's former husbands, and those of Ithiel himself, because their achievements seem to him to cast reflected glory on himself, the man who has wound up with the prize. In the end, though, Bellow's attempt to write the inner life of a passionate modern woman is a disappointment.

Not previously published.



Home Books Bio Blog Contact

Book Reviews Essays & Articles Presentations

Africa Caribbean Travel & Nature Fiction Nonfiction Investing
Geoff Wisner A Theft by Saul Bellow. Penguin Books, 109 pages. Saul Bellow's style is a more delicate instrument than it seems at first, and when it gets out of tune it can suddenly sound all wrong. In Bellow's early career, the buttoned-down prose of Dangling Man and The Victim gave way to the damburst of The Adventures of Augie March, a great, sprawling, crowded, picaresque novel in which Bellow first showed what bumptious energy could be generated by yoking high and low language together. But it was not until later novels like Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet that Bellow demonstrated the depth of emotion and subtleties of character that he could render with that approach. "If I am out of my mind it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog." The first line of that novel, with its heavy hurrying gait, already expresses some of Herzog's character -- clumsy, blurting, impetuous, baffled by a hostile world like a baited bear. Character has always been Bellow's strongest suit, and it sometimes seems that the most successful of his books -- Seize the Day, Herzog, the underrated Dean's December -- have the least in the way of structured plot. The more plot there is, as in Humboldt's Gift, the more out of control and preposterous it tends to become. Clara Velde, unlike most Bellow protagonists, is neither male nor Jewish, and the reach required to create her in the depth required by Bellow's close-focus approach may have been too much. Raised in the "backwoods" of Indiana, she has become a "czarina" of the fashion world, and Bellow insists on her double nature: "In a sophisticated boardroom Clara could be as plain as cornmeal mush, and in such a mood, when she opened her mouth, you couldn't guess whether she would speak or blow bubble gum." Bellow sketches in her background with the kind of hazy approximateness that annoyed Cynthia Ozick about Updike's Henry Bech. "Her father owned small department stores in southern Indiana," we are told, but references to "the sticks," "the backcountry look," "one-room schoolhouses," and even "pioneer women" seem to equate middle-class Indiana with the howling wilderness. The great love of Clara's life is Ithiel Regler, a high-powered international consultant, and to judge from the chummy references to Haig and Kissinger, a fairly conservative one. Once a "wunderkind in nuclear strategy," he appears on talk shows, testifies in Congress, and helps the Italian police track terrorists. What else can we expect from a man whose name means "God is with me"? In Clara's view, which we're given no reason to doubt, Ithiel is a genius and overpoweringly sexy, but we must take this on faith, as we are given little more about him than pronouncements like, "That's my argument with psychiatry: it encourages you to build on abuses and keeps you infantile." (Clara herself is capable of wild pronouncements of her own, as when she says, "It's conceivable that the world-spirit gets into mere girls and makes them its demon-interpreters.") A Theft is about the emerald ring that Clara once made Ithiel buy for her; about its significance to her as a symbol of their love, even as both of them go from one failed marriage to the next; about her losing it, collecting the insurance, then finding it again; about how the ring is then stolen; and about how in recovering it once again she gains a deeper understanding of herself, and of what the ring means to her. Such a theme seems better suited to Maupassant or Henry James than to Bellow, and that may be much of the problem. Bellow's More Die of Heartbreak had a Jamesian subject too; like The Portrait of a Lady, it was about the way a naive soul can be exploited in the wrong kind of marriage. But where the provincial vulnerability of Isabel Archer made her plight tragic, the situation of Benn Crader, world-famous botanist, was merely ridiculous and pathetic, since he had gotten into his fix through his own absent-minded unwillingness to look at his situation squarely. In A Theft, the Jamesian subject is coupled with a Jamesian indirection that can be maddening. Like Seize the Day, A Theft is set in New York City, or "Gogmagogsville," as Clara repeatedly refers to it, but the city is described only in terms of the insides of hotels and apartment buildings. Clara comes home to find that her Austrian au pair has thrown a wild party, and that the girl's lover, a handsome Haitian named Frederic, is still there. Frederic, as it turns out, has Clara's ring in his pocket. But here, in the only scene in which Clara lays eyes on Frederic, she does not speak to him or even make eye contact. He is barely described. Yet Clara broods and speculates on him endlessly, as a symbol of the dangerous attractions that Gogmagogsville offers to young girls. In Mr. Sammler's Planet, a black urban criminal was presented very differently. In the vividly described scene that opens the book, Sammler confronts a pickpocket whose strength, grace and style made him on one level admirable, and rendered the question of whether Sammler or Bellow himself might harbor racist attitudes almost beside the point. But the indirection and false notes with which similar material is handled in A Theft make such questions inescapable. "My husband and I are not rashists," Clara tells the au pair, fluffing the word as if nervous. She mentions that her company has divested from South Africa, and makes a mental note to ask Ithiel his opinion of divestiture. (It hardly seems necessary; he'll be against it.) A Theft does have some of the wit and pungency that we read Bellow for. The cleaning woman, Clara thinks, "was an honest lady, according to her lights, but there probably were certain corners into which those lights never were turned." We see the billionaire leftist Giangiacomo F. "going on about revolutionary insurgency" while his butler grates truffles. And the complacency of Clara's husband Wilder Velde is perceptively and humorously drawn. He enjoys keeping up with the doings of Clara's former husbands, and those of Ithiel himself, because their achievements seem to him to cast reflected glory on himself, the man who has wound up with the prize. In the end, though, Bellow's attempt to write the inner life of a passionate modern woman is a disappointment. Not previously published.