Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth Century American Writers

I’m not a fan of Saul Bellow, but this book is probably the best study of the writer that I’ve read so far. In fact, Edward Mandelson’s portrait of him is greater than anything Bellow ever wrote himself. He portrays Bellow as maturing from a liberal parent to a seriously non-liberal old patriarch, browbeating his kids. Strange, how he went from practicing what he preached to being one of the mean old cranks he’d write about in his books.

Mandelson’s portrayal of Norman Mailer is not flattering, probably because there isn’t much about Mailer to flatter. Okay, Bellow was a bit of an Archie Bunker type in his later life, but Mailer just comes off as nasty. Never mind the incident where he attacked his wife; Mandelson portrays Mailer as being so overindulged by his mother that he grew to expect indulgence throughout his lie. If you expect the author of this book to trash Mailer over the issue of Jack Henry Abbott, you will find that he doesn’t. However, he doesn’t forgive either. Mandelson argues that mailer was conned; Abbott was ratting out the other prisoners, and it was the warden and US Attorney who pushed for the release in order to be rid of him. The “radical chic” element comes into play too, as Mailer was a hypocrite, easily conned by Abbott’s eloquent rhetoric.

I have to wonder if maybe Mandelson has picked a poor example. These writers are all from an earlier era, and there have been more great American writers making their debut in the decades since. What about Steven King, Amy Tan, and Toni Morrison? What about David Sedaris, Mary Karr, and Sandra Cisneros? The writers from the Baby Boom generation had their own unique contributions, and it doesn’t seem fair to leave them out.