castle of illusion

This novel probably confirmed Bellow’s fitness for the Nobel Prize. It is in competition with Herzog as the best of Bellow’s extended fiction, but it has less self-pity in it and is much funnier. The hero-narrator is Charlie Citrine (a name apparently taken, like Moses Herzog, from Joyce’s Ulysses), a successful but impractical Chicago writer who was a friend of the dead failed poet Von Humboldt Fleisher (probably based on Delmore Schwartz). The gift of the title is a film scenario which, after long incubation, emerges from nowhere and makes Citrine improbably rich. Bellow seems to know little about the film world, but no matter. He knows Chicago very well and much of the book concerns Citrine’s comic misfortunes, and rarer triumphs, in that city. He is in trouble with a small vicious gangster improbably named Cantabile, who is drawn to Citrine because of his very apparent inability to cope with the real tough world. He is in trouble with his divorced wife, who demands more alimony. His girl friend, the gorgeous animal Renata, talks of turning into Persephone and marrying a king of the dead, a successful mortician. The story moves slowly, but we do not mind. The richness with which Bellow presents the physical world, into which he allows Citrine’s moral and metaphysical speculations to intrude at length, is a great joy. Cirtine’s much qualified success as a writer (Pulitzer Prize, ribbon of the Légion d’honneur) is contrasted with the decay of Humboldt, who, though dead, will not lie down. The distinction of the book lies, as always with Bellow, in its presentation of character. We do not much care whether his personages labour at furthering the plot: they are a pleasure to contemplate in themselves. Citrine’s wealthy capitalist brother, for instance, does nothing except delay Citrine’s flight for Spain (Renata does not wait for him there: she goes off with her mortician), but we are happy to be presented with him in depth and breadth. Bellow may be considered not altogether a natural novelist — he rarely moves from Chicago; much of his material is autobiographical — but he excels at animating a distinguished prose style with the pulse of life. (from Anthony Burgess’ 99 Novels)