Saul Bellow’s sixth book, Herzog, appeared the same year as Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and Bob Dylan’s first entirely self-penned album The Times They Are a-Changin’. On the face of it, this expansive but interiorized novel of Jewish-American intellectual life has little in common either with them or with the Beatnik mirage Bowie’s brother Terry would have been selling him around this time.
But Herzog has the same speedy jazz energy as Kerouac’s On the Road; the same sense of a whole fizzing, multitudinous world being drawn into a single person’s field of vision; the same awareness of that world’s ability to drive you insane.
Herzog is exhausting and inexhaustible, as dense and learned as it is sensual and hilarious. Its antihero is an anxious middle-aged Jewish academic tormented to an obsessive degree by his ex-wife Madeleine’s affair. She is involved with Herzog’s former friend Valentine Gersbach, a one-legged, red-haired radio presenter. There’s no plot as such. Rather, the novel locks us inside Herzog’s racing brain, the sort of brain Bowie would have recognized, as it makes vast associational leaps between his poverty-stricken Montreal childhood—his father was a bootlegger during Prohibition—his failing career, his previous marriages, his current chaotic love life, and his distant relationship with his children. At irregular intervals it has what amount to seizures in the form of letters Herzog writes (though never sends) to friends and acquaintances, family members, public figures, and philosophers.
So intimately do we share Herzog’s paranoia that we risk missing Bellow’s hints that this failed mensch is misreading signals. Was Madeleine’s behavior so unreasonable? Is Valentine such a devious bastard? Herzog barely pauses to consider. He’s restless, constantly in motion, sometimes reaching a destination only to panic and turn back. Only sex with his exotic, male-fantasy-figure lover Ramona seems to turn his brain off.
An injection of drama comes when Herzog receives a letter from the babysitter of his and Madeleine’s daughter, Junie. He learns that Valentine locked Junie in the car during a row with Madeleine. Roused to action, Herzog takes his father’s old pistol and goes to their house, intending to kill Valentine and Madeleine. But then he looks through the window and sees Valentine washing June with love and tenderness. It’s the beginning of Herzog’s own fall into properly proportioned self-awareness, a state he attains at the end of the novel as he picks a bouquet of flowers for Ramona and cooks her dinner. Simple, domestic things. Small, human connections of the kind Bowie was so good at making. The urge to write letters leaves him like a banished migraine.