Each Man Knows: A review of Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

I hope that Viking Press didn't pay too much for the cover design on their initial printing of Saul Bellow's novel Mr. Sammler's Planet. Although I could see them cycling through a host of options before finally throwing up their hands and deciding to just take a deep blue and slap some black and white letters over it. Then, of course, they had to make them overlap a bit, for creativity reasons.

As he often does, Bellow travels through whatever weaving line the story follows, painting an alarming, complex portrait of the mindscape of his protagonist. And what a protagonist Mr. Sammler is. A one-eyed Holocaust survivor in his twilight years, Sammler reflects and speaks to a lifetime of study and thought as characters around him fight recklessly to find their place.

He interacts with a princely black pickpocket, a dying doctor, a Hindu scientist interested in the colonization of other planets, a driftless entrepreneur, a coattail-riding artist, an adoring niece, and his own promiscuous daughter. In the face of these characters and their stabs at meaning, Mr. Sammler speculates. He pontificates. He wrestles.

And when he gets to where the story has been going all along, the mass of images and ideas forms a crystalline web that centers elegantly on Bellow's subject, which I would humbly submit is the question of how we respond to our destiny.

Like most of my Imaginary Readers, I cringe when I read the word destiny. It's a Disney word. A Pocahontas-type concept. In our culture, it's the stuff of lame self-help literature. But not in Bellow's hands.

In Bellow's hands, destiny is the sum of countless inscrutable factors. It's something you can't name, something you wrestle with, something that defies your best understanding, but that you can recognize immediately.

Sammler has plenty of ideas to keep his mind occupied, to get him through explanations, but in the end, after the death of a dear friend, Sammler says this:

He was aware that he must meet-- through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding--he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows.

And, despite all that Sammler doesn't know, can't understand, can't explain, the truth of his observation resonates. We are people of destiny. We are moving through a story with an ending out of reach.

We know this is true, but we fear it. We cringe from it. We squirm and argue our way out of it. And, in the end, when our hand has been played, our life is defined by how fully we live out the terms of our contract.

And perhaps those who designed the cover to this resonant novel felt that they had found the cover that destiny had ordained for the book. Which is a scary thought for several reasons which I do not aim to explore here.