Bellow Zero

Saul Bellow.  Maybe it’s just me.  He sits high up there on the lists of the 20^th Century greats and, after all Marty¹ likes him, so maybe it’s just me but I’ve never yet felt that he cuts the mustard.

I’ve been reading Henderson the Rain King.  Is it supposed to be funny? Allowing for the fact that humour dates², was it ever funny?  I haven’t cracked a smile.  Is it supposed to be, in some way, profound?  I haven’t felt the slightest of ripples of profundity lap over me. 

Seventy pages to go.  I suppose that there’s a chance that it’ll snap-to and, assuming that I can be bothered to finish it, it’ll leave me with such an impression that I’ll feel impelled to go back and read it over.  It seems pretty unlikely right now.    I tried The Adventures of Augie March some years ago.   I.  Couldn’t.  Get.  Into.  It.  Does this diminish me?  I don’t feel diminished. 

  

¹ Mind you, Marty raves on about Nabokov too and I don’t think too much of him either.  Pale Fire is one of the worst critically acclaimed books that I have ever given up the precious unrecoverable hours of my life to not enjoying.  As for Lolita, it is just creepy.*

² See: The Goons (mostly), Abbott and Costello, The Young Ones (which has dated horribly in a way that the contemporaneous The Good Life hasn’t).

* My sense of creepiness as regards Lolita was only heightened by taking it out in my bag one day, sitting down in a park to read it and only gradually, and awfully, waking up to the fact that I was sitting opposite the playing field of a girls’ school.  They were playing hockey.  I left.