An American Dream Expanded/Publishers Weekly Currents, March 23, 1965
 | From Publishers Weekly, March 22, 1965 Number 12. Though they are in-process, copyright permissions have not yet been secured for this excerpt. If you are the copyright holder, please contact the editor. |
Mailer on Herzog
Midway through explaining his own views as a “moral nihilist” at the March 10 press conference for three authors held during NBA week, novelist Norman Mailer delivered some pithy comments on Herzog, the novel that had just won the National Book Award, and its author, Saul Bellow. “I have great admiration for Herzog as a novel,” said Mr. Mailer, “but it is not an intellectual book, it has no ideas in it. It has about the same relation to ideas that a cookbook has to good eating. Just about every idea man has ever had is referred to in it. There are all sorts of discussions but absolutely nothing new.”
An American Dream Expanded.
Mailer on Bellow
What Herzog does have, in the Mailer view, is “a sense of compassion I haven’t come across in a long time. There is something almost Russian about Herzog,” Mr. Mailer said. “You have to go back to Dostoeyevsky to find a parallel, but Herzog also has so much self-pity. What did impress me about it was that my heart was literally burning as I read it. It might be one of the most important books written in America in years and it might not, because it has mistakes. I do not know. But I do know that I do not see Bellow as lord of the intellectuals. He has the mind of a rather dull college professor who has read too many books and grasped the essence of none of them.”
