MR. SAMMLER'S PLANET

Name: MR. SAMMLER'S PLANET
Author: Saul Bellow
ISBN: 0142437832

by Saul Bellow ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 30, 1969

Bellow has generally been considered our most intelligent and palpably stylish writer; beyond that there's the marvelous...

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Mr. Sammler's planet will be terra firma to all Bellow admirers.

The novel is, as Herzog was, a polemic, or discourse—a dazzling discourse commenting on man and always searching for "what is normal for human life" through one of his put-upon, assertive, strenuously speculative dangling men. Or victims. But always, somehow, a resilient survivor. This time it's Sammler, a refugee via Poland and two decades in England, now in Manhattan (grapefruit juice on the window sill, onion rolls in a humidor). Sammler has only one good eye but it's "full of observation," as is Bellow's for the particulars which give his works such a crowded, restless vitality. ("His senses are especially alive to things and he catches the sensation that the things have created the people or permeated them"—Pritchett.) Sammler's a septuagenarian—too old not to be aware of his cleavage from the present generation ("Who had made shit a sacrament?"); an admirer and friend of H. G. Wells, he often wonders how long this earth will be the only hope of man; and whether "this liberation into individuality" has failed (Bellow has always been passionately involved with the unique needs and powers of the individual and his "contract" with humanity); and what will happen in that unknowable future. And of course at seventy death is just a whisper away ("No one knew when to quit. No one made sober decent terms with death")—in fact very close as the kinsman-friend who imported him lies dying in the hospital. Among the other things that happen here (always incidental, in Bellow): his witness of a pickpocket on a bus; his trouble over his daughter Shula (her "open elements" baffle him) who steals a manuscript in his interest, however misguidedly; the romance of his niece; his general availability as a confidant to the luxuriously sensuous Angela (her father is the dying man) and other; etc., etc.

Bellow has generally been considered our most intelligent and palpably stylish writer; beyond that there's the marvelous intellectual agility and animation; and of course the swaggering comic spirit which keeps Sammler, like Herzog, so triumphantly alive.

Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1969

ISBN: 0142437832

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1969

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SIMPLE GIMPL
by Isaac Bashevis Singer ; translated by Isaac Bashevis Singer , Saul Bellow & David Stromberg ; illustrated by Liana Finck

- BOOK REVIEW
THERE IS SIMPLY TOO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT
by Saul Bellow edited by Benjamin Taylor

- BOOK REVIEW
COLLECTED STORIES
by Saul Bellow

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.