The tur­bu­lent lives of Saul Bellow’s friends and fam­i­ly are filled with jeal­ousy, treach­ery, fame and poet­ry, but despite their dra­ma and his­tor­i­cal impact, they are lit­tle-known out­side of aca­d­e­m­ic Eng­lish depart­ments. For­tu­nate­ly, in Bellow’s Peo­ple, David Mikics con­dens­es an intro­duc­to­ry sur­vey course into a few hun­dred pages.

Famil­iar­i­ty with Bellow’s writ­ing will help read­ers find and enjoy Bellow’s Peo­ple, but isn’t required for com­pre­hen­sion. Mikics’s book is much more a col­lec­tion of bio­graph­i­cal essays about literati than a work of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism. Rather than focus on the orig­i­nal­i­ty and genius of Bellow’s voice, Mikics fills the pages instead with frag­men­tary quotes of the author and his acquain­tances’ idio­syn­crat­ic, nat­ur­al speech. Mikics’s inter­est in Yid­dish and the sub­tle way Bel­low sat­u­rat­ed his work with it deserves spe­cial note — and per­haps its own study — but it does not occu­py a major place in these stories.

The tour is rough­ly chrono­log­i­cal, fol­low­ing the order of Bellow’s nov­els from The Adven­tures of Augie March to Rav­el­stein, blend­ing sum­ma­ry with bio­graph­i­cal accounts of the bases of the char­ac­ters in Bellow’s life. Some of Bellow’s peo­ple, like the nov­el­ist Ralph Elli­son, nev­er fig­ured into his lit­er­a­ture, but Mikics traces their impact on Bellow’s work con­vinc­ing­ly. Bel­low him­self emerges as one of his own most inter­est­ing peo­ple, fig­ur­ing as the mod­el for the hero in many of his nov­els and a mark­er of his evolv­ing idea of hero­ism, a sort of extend­ed Shake­spear­i­an debate with him­self as he matures about the absur­di­ty of life.

The orga­ni­za­tion is some­times awk­ward, as when Mikics emphat­i­cal­ly ascribes per­son­al­i­ty traits to real peo­ple in the course of sum­ma­riz­ing and draw­ing par­al­lels between Bellow’s fic­tion well before those peo­ple appear in anec­dotes. We’re remind­ed of the fury Saul’s broth­er Mau­ry inher­it­ed from their furi­ous father before any scene of out­rage is introduced.

Mikics’s main crit­i­cal argu­ment that Bellow’s lit­er­ary inno­va­tion is to make raw real­ism an uplift­ing comedic enter­prise is under­cut by the focus on Bellow’s chron­ic descent into bit­ter­ness and jeal­ousy. Mikics is prob­a­bly cor­rect, but look to the nov­els for the com­e­dy. Like Bel­low, Mikics allows pre­cise descrip­tions of his sub­jects’ antics to speak for them­selves with very lit­tle edi­to­ri­al­iz­ing. Each real-life episode (the infi­deli­ty and col­lapse of Bellow’s first mar­riage; his rebound remar­riage to an ex-girl­friend of Philip Roth) reveals a depth of char­ac­ter vivid enough for fiction.

Mikics’s con­stant task is instead to sit­u­ate the peo­ple in his­to­ry and the voic­es in their lit­er­ary con­texts, com­par­ing and con­trast­ing every­thing in the style of an exam­ple col­le­giate essay. The book is aca­d­e­m­ic for a pop­u­lar audi­ence, but it makes an approach­able and reward­ing course. Over the course of his own life­time, Bel­low pre­served count­less larg­er-than-life per­son­al­i­ties in raw but mas­ter­ful por­traits of their lives in motion; Mikics couldn’t pos­si­bly approach the same task in these slim biogra­phies, but he man­ages with a sim­i­lar spir­it to cap­ture the epic scope of Bellow’s effort.

Relat­ed Content:

• Saul Bel­low Read­ing List
• David Alba­hari: The Voice
• Boris Fish­man: Bernard Mala­mud at 60: The Wrong Writer for Our Age