Summary
Professor Benn Crader, an esteemed botanist, has been living a rarefied intellectual life. Then he marries a sublimely beautiful woman whose gorgeousness conceals a deeply avaricious nature: she and her family are plotting to involve him in a multimillion-dollar blackmail scheme. Crader's nephew Kenneth Trachtenberg narrates this story of disillusionment, as a man who believes ardently in the transforming power of love finds himself entrenched in a disaster. The book's title comes from one of Trachtenberg's anecdotes about his uncle Benn: when he was asked about the dangers of radiation, Crader said, ''It's terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak." As in so many of Saul Bellow's novels, this one reflects on the nature of happiness, on the mind-body dichotomy, and on what it takes to survive with integrity intact in the deeply flawed society that America has become in the late 20th century.
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Media Reviews
"Crackles with intelligence and wit....Not only proof that Bellow can live up to his own standards; it is also a reminder of how diminished a thing postwar fiction would have been without him."
-- Time
"It sparkles."
-- Washington Post
"Bellow's comedy is cunningly planned: we rollick, then we pause to think."
-- Newsweek
"One turns the last pages feeling that no image has been left unexplored by a mind not only at constant work but standing outside itself, mercilessly examining the workings, tracking the leading issues of our times and the composite man in an age of hybrids." -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
-- New York Times Book Review
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Chivers North Amer
Published date: 1988
Size: 5.75 x 8.75 inches
Weight: 1.3 pounds
Publisher's Notes
Kenneth Trachtenberg, an expert in Russian history and literature, tries to protect his revered uncle Benn Crader, a world-renowned botanist, from a tangle of family relationships, greed, and the willfullness of the human heart.
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