Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The weight of the unspoken left them with very little to say. And, yet, Tommy Wilhelm and his father find plenty of words to throw at each other, sniping around the edges of the unspoken, in the course of Bellow's crisp and penetrating fourth novel Tommy bemoaning his father's lack of support for his son at a time of great personal trial, his father complaining about his son's all-around ineptitude. Bellow made his name as one of the towering literary figures of the twentieth century with long, heavily textured novels, weighty in both theme and scope (in particular, The Adventures of Augie March, 1953; Henderson the Rain King, 1959; and Humboldt's Gift, 1975), but early in his career, he wrote three short novels that, despite weaving their magic on a much smaller scale, were no less compelling (Dangling Man, 1944; The Victim, 1947; and Seize the Day, 1956). The latter, which followed on the heels of Augie March, seemed like an aberration to readers who knew Bellow only from the Pulitzer-winning Augie, but in fact, it was thoroughly of a piece with two of the author's first three books. We meet Tommy Wilhelm (his real name is Wilky Adler) when the fortysomething former salesman is living in a Manhattan residential hotel (also home to his retired father) and reeling from multiple failures. Still, Tommy dreams, yet again, of another way to reinvent himself, his previous incarnations as actor, businessman, husband, and father all having crashed and burned in ways more pathetic than spectacular. As Tommy embarks on yet another inevitably ruinous venture playing the commodities market with an obvious con man, the elusive (but bizarrely funny) Dr. Tamkin we listen to this sad sack of an American, New York born, as he whines in excruciating detail, drenched in both pathos and black humor, about a veritable murderers' row of antagonists: ungrateful former bosses, a coldhearted wife who won't grant him a divorce, the various con men who have led him astray, and, most of all, his father, a self-made man with no tolerance for a son who finds putting together the pieces of a self to be a puzzle beyond comprehension. On the face of it, very little happens in this book Tommy has breakfast, observes the action on the floor of the commodities market, and wanders into a funeral of someone he doesn't know but beneath the surface, the drama is remarkably intense, as we watch one nearly anonymous man abandon the attempt to put himself back together. Yes, the book is about the underside of the American Dream but not just the dream of financial success, though that is a large part of it. No, what Bellow shows in crystalline, utterly uncompromising terms is one man's inability to construct an individual myth for himself. When Tommy Wilhelm cries inconsolably at the funeral of an unknown man, he weeps not for the inevitability of death but for the inability to make a life.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
