Imagining Our Souls: A Review of Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

Before I get into Saul Bellow's little powerhouse of a novel, a word about introductions, forewords, and prefaces.

Unless I finish a novel with a feeling of wonder, I rarely read the introduction. Any kind of foreword usually functions to inflate the page count, advertise the book (why, if I'm already reading a book, do I need to read an ad for it?), and attach some big shot author's name with the work at hand.

However, there are those few introductions which function as great literature in their own right. Tom Wolfe, in his introduction to Bonfire of the Vanities (I have yet to read the book, but I have read the introduction at least three times), offers readers a lucid, hilarious, paradigm-shifting look at the history of style and content in the modern novel. David Eggers, in the Preface to A Hearbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, confronts every imagined complaint about his memoir and vehemently defends his choices, offering a blazing portrait of the self-consciousness that he goes on to explore in the book. And, in the intro to Seize the Day by Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick effectively illuminates literature's unique power, and spotlights Bellow's work as a defining example of that force.

She compares literature, with its descriptions and suggestions, with the pre-processed sights and sounds of television and cinema. She mourns the time when novels were a shared language in our culture, saying the following:

If literature can give new eyes to human beings, it is because the thing held in common is separately imagined.

A world where we all share a certain bibliography, with which we all interact in our own imaginations, is difficult to imagine. We just don't read that much anymore, and the volume of books being published scatters the few readers left to their own favored genres and authors.

So, fellow readers, if we are to correct this problem, I suggest that we start with Seize the Day. I suggest this for a few reasons.

First, the book is notably short. Barely over one hundred pages, it is compact in its time span, plot, and action. Second, its density is astounding. It packs in stunning, nuanced explorations of loyalty, generations, marriage, financial stress, cities, psychology, spirituality, and the quest for the soul. Third, on the tail end of the second, it presents us with a shared Truth which we seperately imagine: We each have a soul that transcends our circumstances.

The book spends its time in the head of Tommy Wilhelm, a failed actor and an unemployed salesman, seperated from his family, living in an apartment near his retired father in New York. Wilhelm throws his money into one last gamble, trusting a purported psychologist and investing in lard.

While the mind of a character has been a common setting for novels in recent years, Bellow's choice to paint the landscape of his character's inner life was an innovation in its time, and it still astounds and inspires in its result, despite the flood of followers.

The final chapter, moving in response to Wilhelm's misfortunes and poor choices, plunges deep after the human soul, until it is out of sight.

The way Wilhelm falls apart, the way he rages and fumes and fights and grieves, all suggests some presence beyond comprehension. Some guiding platonic reality that requires the complete obliteration of his pride, self-delusion, and wealth.

Very little in the story goes the way we might hope. But when we leave Wilhelm's story, and we are filled with a new, deeper sense of hope that transcends the events of the book.

So the book leaves us with a sense of assurance that there is a soul within the man, but it allows us to wonder at its nature and to wonder at our own souls as well.

That, fellow readers, is an outcome well worth both our shared exploration and our individual imagination.

Poetic Facts

My official writer's bio reads:

Half-American, half-Australian, Philippine-raised, Chicago-educated, Atlanta-dwelling writer Ian North lives and works with immigrants and refugees. He mentors and equips members of the international community to tell their own stories through writing, visual art, and music. He is also involved in several creative projects, including a blog of off-kilter folk stories and songs at http://ghosttownrevival.wordpress.com.

But if I were to write my story, to really write it as I'm learning to see it, it would be the story of a movement from Scotland to Australia to India to China to Indonesia to the Philippines. It would be short on memoir, long on family history. It would take years of research that I don't know how to do, and it would owe its scope to a book called Unto the Sons by Gay Talese.

Talese is the son of an Italian-American tailor named Joseph Talese, himself the son of an Italian immigrant to the United States. I'd read some of Talese's work in The Gay Talese Reader a few years back, so I was aware of his ability to make nonfiction reports resonate with narrative immediacy, a trademark common to practicioners of the "New Journalism," a writing movement spawned by reporters and nonfiction novelists like Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson.

While other writers in this movement employed a cavalier approach to phrasing, language, and self-characterization, Talese maintained a style that may have cost him the celebrity that visited many of his contemporaries: formal, immaculately structured portrayal of fact.

The reason that I find Unto the Sons so compelling is the subject: Talese turns his journalistic eye on his own family history. He sees himself as part of a massive movement, discussing Italian history, moving seamlessly from Roman Empire to World War I to the formation of the Mafia and its roots in America to his own childhood as an Italian-American during WWII.

So, where I always saw Talese as a brilliant collector of fact and a masterful essayist, I now see the roots of his talent, the development of his eye for minute but significant details, and his comfort with a formal, well-dressed approach to examining the human soul.

What does this have to do with me? It makes me want to know where I come from. I want to understand where my little life, my interests, my movements, my troubles, my talent all come from, and where they all lead.

What of my great uncle who played harmonica with the Sydney Orchestra? Has anyone upstream battled depression like me? Who left the Christian faith, and who stayed? Were the evangelists to China and India ever doubtful of their work or purpose? What drove them forward or slowed them down?

There are dozens of relatable movements in Unto the Sons, especially to someone who comes from a well-traveled line. But the main drive it leaves me with is the desire to be the Gay Talese of my own family line.

The gift given to me by God and/or genetics and/or a few encouraging teachers was to write. So when this gift turns to a profession and I have the time and resources, the North family will have its own book which looks back and finds the poetry in the facts of our heritage, and hands it forward as a legacy for our children to do with as they see fit.