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Considering Sammler, a reader at first suspects that he is about to be afflicted with yet one more sensitive, cultivated, mournful Jewish intellectual of the kind that have haunted recent fiction. Gradually, the perception dawns that Sammler is to such literary figures approximately what a peregrine falcon is to a street sparrow. Sammler, in fact, is a wiseman, though the description, which would once have been adequate to describe his position in society, is now vague. Though Sammler once was an intellectual, he no longer is. He wrote once, too, but he no longer does.
Though it is mere frippery, Bellow has provided Sammler and other characters with punnish names suggesting, in Sammler's case, faint resonances with "Uncle Sam" and "storage battery," which is Sammler in German. It will be possible for critics to see the old man as a repository of all the Western attitudes and wisdoms accumulated since the Renaissance, confronting America today and attempting an impossible task, not to pass judgment, but to shape some humane yet honest likeness of its complexity. Sammler's real objective, though, is trying to live "with a civil heart." He is a kind of reference volume in which fools and others can look to find what sanity is. His principal life's labor is to be sane.
Harder than Herzog. The span of the book is that of a brief dying. Gruner, his benefactor, a decent man with a longing for family roots, has entered a hospital for "minor surgery." Actually, there is a frayed blood vessel in Gruner's skull. In the few days it takes him to die, the city wind whirls scraps and tatters of the times about Sammler's ears: violence, florid sexuality, the dissolution of order, the clamor of too much sensation at jammed nerve ends. This is the book—an elderly man. jostled about, thinking. It is easily the most exciting novel Bellow has written. Sammler is a spiritual adventurer at least as rambunctious as Henderson, that daft giant who rummaged Africa in search of himself. And Sammler's mind has a far harder edge to it than Herzog's.
It copes calmly with an accumulation of trivia, of enormities: "Is our species crazy?" Sammler muses. "Plenty of evidence." He sees a pickpocket at work on a bus, tries unsuccessfully to report him to the police (they are not interested) and sees him again. Fascinated —crime vivifies all phenomena, he notes —Sammler is trailed to his apartment by the pickpocket. A tall, princely, beautifully dressed Negro, he holds Sammler against the wall of the lobby, unzips his fly and contemptuously exposes himself. Then he leaves. An omen, but of what? Sammler, set free, broods that "a sexual madness was overwhelming the Western world." He recalls hearing that a U.S. President "was supposed to have shown himself in a similar way to the representatives of the press."