The Dean’s December
Saul Bellow
Harper &Row, $13.95

Plotless and knowing, The Dean’s December‘s many pages serve only to remind us that a famous style does not a novel make. Saul Bellow has his mastery, and no page in this disappointing book is untouched by it. The book offers us the familiar Bellowian things: Chicago, the wiles of women, aging experts, learned allusions, and a sour commentary on the way the world is headed. We are still on Mr. Sammler’s planet and it’s still a loud and sorry place to be:

our brains grow feebler. This disaster also overtook the Roman Empire. . . . Now it’s the whole world. And it isn’t the Grand Inquisitor’s universal anthill that we have to worry about after all, but something worse, more Titanic-universal stupefaction, a Saturnian, wild, gloomy murderousness, the raging of irritated nerves, and intelligence reduced by metal poison, so that the main ideas of mankind die out, including of course the idea of freedom.

Thus speaks the book’s protagonist, Albert Corde. The feckless dean of a Chicago university, Corde travels with his wife to Rumania, there to see his mother-in-law die in a gloomy state hospital. Looking at the old woman, he weeps, but “with an eager violence, a kind of get-it-over ecstasy mingling pity and destructiveness. . . . The trip had been long. He was fagged, dried out. His guts were strained. He felt plugged in the rear. Circulation to the face and scalp seemed insufficient. And a kind of demonic excitement rose up, for which no resolution seemed possible.” At last she dies, and the single element of plot in the book is removed. Everything else is talk-demonic, ironic, bitter, and cryptic talk.

If there is a distinction between Corde and Bellow, it is a forced one. This book, like Bellow’s last three productions—Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, and To Jerusalem and Back—should be read as a testimonial. It is about Bellow’s attitudes, about how life should be seen when, after travel, marriages, argument, death, revolutionary aspiration, and books, the ultimate vanities are plain to the eye. We are living, Bellow-Corde lets us know, as parts of “an all-but-derelict civilization.” All about him he sees signs of the great apocalypse.

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