That doesn't sound so much like horror or anarchy or even the insides of the horror, the causes of it. It sounds more like studied expression, a bit of stylized rhetoric and not a real indication of where the problem lies. Possibly Bellow intends to convey the impotence of to speech about the subject. But that seems unlikely. Though Corde is not Bellow, there is an unmistakably close relationship between the intellect of creator and character.

Yet another, more important, reason why the reader can never feel so urgent a threat from the debris of the city as Corde lies in the logorrhea of the work, idea-rrhea, maybe, would be a better word. Bellow has long made the wild stringing of ideas a calling card of his, utilizing it next in Herzog. The average Bellow chapter contains mention of more great thinkers than there are on the Modern Library publication list, and usually he pulls it off. But in The Dean's December one senses the so-called "novel of ideas" working back-on itself, turning horror into an abstraction rather than applying the ideas to make some out of the horror. Bellow writes about the process of thinking about the manifold breakdown Corde is observing.

You see(Corde say), you being to lose contact with human beings and with the world. You experience spiritual loneliness. And of course there are the classics to mull over. Dostoyevsky's apathy-with-intensity, and the rage for goodness so near to vileness and murderousness, and Nietzsche and the Existentialists, and all the rest of that. Then you tire of this preoccupation with the condition of being cut off, and it seems better to go out and see at first hand the big manifestations of disorder and take a fresh reading from them.

But somehow large quantities of "Baudelaire and Rilke, even Montesquieu and Vico; also Machiavelli; also Plato" still get slathered over everything. The novel does not asphyxiate beneath this icing. But it is certainly not Bellow's best staff.

Luckily, crime and the underclass are not the only element in The Dean's December. Bellow may not have achieved the great foray into the alien waters he had hoped for, but he remains brilliantly entertaining on his home turf. In particular, his characters are dazzling. Valeria Raresh, Corde's mother-in-law, for whom the Corders have traveled to Rumania (Bellow, incidentally, also went to Bucharest several years ago with his mathematician wife on a similar journey) lies in a state hospital, her face criss-crossed with tapes and tubes. After a coronary and a stroke, it is only a matter of time for Valeria. But in Corde's reminiscences of her. She is a strikingly vital character. "Great Valeria," the psychiatrist, the epitome of Old World class in a country of New Age brutality and philistinism, the matriarch who called the shots for a circle of loyal women spread out over thousands of miles, from Chicago to Bucharest. Corde comes to understand her more, to love her.

Or Dewey Spangler, a top-flight newspaper columnist a la Alsop who wields more power than any single senator, a boyhood chum of Corde's who turns up on swing through Eastern Europe. As a kid, Spangler was inebriated with Swinburne, Wilde, Nietzsche. Now he is slick, in analysis, still a bit cowed by Corde, and at the same time vindictive.

There are plenty more, and Bellow again demonstrates his keen sense of how all these disparate people are thrown, indeed, bonded together over huge distances and years. Even in this his "dark" book. Bellow shows a strong instinct for seeking out and lauding the crumbs of humanity he finds in the interstices of an inhuman world. The appearance of crowds of Valeria's friends at her funeral dressed in the threadbare finery they saved from the pre-way years is an occasion for quiet joy. And in the give-and-take between Corde and his wife. Bellow demonstrates his acute sense of the way emotional exchanges are made in the world.

Saul Bellow falters somewhat in The Dean's December. It will not stand as his best book, probably not even one of his best three of four. It is, nonetheless, reassuring in a strange way that the shortcomings of the work are due to experimentation and imperfect exploration and not to any diminution of the genius which made him one of the country's finest writers.