BELLOW, RESTIVE SOUL.

This article focuses on the novels written by Saul Bellow, who died in 2005. I was fortunate to become friendly with Saul Bellow in his last decade, while I was editor of Books in Canada. We talked of death, and the soul, and the recalcitrant erotic sense so many human beings have that they will reunite with their loved ones after death. I asked him if his sense of death had changed since his earliest recognition that we die, or whether each thought of death thereafter was more of the same. Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and more high honours than any other American writer, died last week at 89, at home in Brookline, Mass. The list of writers who believe Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March is The Great American Novel includes Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, who ultimately concluded that Bellow would emerge "as the supreme American novelist." The author was born in Lachine, Quebec, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, and moved to Chicago with his family when he was 9. In Augie, his third novel, published in 1953, Bellow invented a new style of writing that freed him and generations that followed. Following Augie, Bellow produced comic-melancholic novels such as Herzog, Henderson the Rain King, and Humboldt's Gift. For Bellow, the "isms" of the intellectuals were too flat and never did justice to the soul, a word he often used. I stayed up much of the night again last week after I heard he'd died, and I grieved that now our great soliloquist is silenced.