ABSTRACT
In reviewing Saul Bellow’s collection of five story-novellas entitled Him With His Foot In His Mouth in 1984 in the New York Times Book Review, Cynthia Ozick, one of the most accomplished of contemporary American fictionists, claims that in this work Bellow newly and openly decodes himself. Ozick’s defense of him is therefore significant: No preciousness, of the ventriloquist kind or any other; no carelessness either; no romantic aping of archaisms or nostalgias; no restraints born out of theories of form or faddish tenets of experimentalism or ideological crypticness. The ideas of literature having a meaning, and insisting on coherence as its hidden subject are de rigueur for Ozick, and she is militant in their defense. Ozick’s own realization of the corona of moral purpose can be seen through brief analytical reference to her novel, The Cannibal Galaxy. In this spare, tightly constructed book, there is indeed “no visible principle or moral imperative” that can be tidily and tritely encapsulated.
