There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction of Saul Bellow

This rich but unorganized collection of Bellow’s reviews, essays, speeches, and interviews illuminate his lifelong exploration of what it means to be an American, a Jew, and a writer. As assembled by Taylor, the pieces succeed in showing that Bellow’s calling was, in the novelist’s own words, “not to preach but to relate.” In the essay “The Writer as Moralist,” Bellow rejects the art-for-art’s-sake ethos of novelists like Flaubert and Joyce, but stops short of claiming to be a moralist. In “Machines and Storybooks: Literature in the Age of Technology,” Bellow examines the dilemma facing writers in American culture, asking, “How do you overcome this noise?” His answer is that storytelling acts like a nervous system, filtering the modern world’s abundance of sensation and information and allowing us to find the “quiet of the soul that art demands.” Some readers will appreciate that Taylor does not impose his own perspective on the pieces, yet in the absence of any introduction, commentary, or footnotes, those new to Bellow may have the same problem he did: “there is simply too much to think about.” (Mar.)