The Victim, by Saul Bellow
The biggest problem with the 1001 books list is that, when the makers like an author, they tend to add EVERYTHING that that author wrote, not just the masterpieces but a whole lot of lesser works that you *don't* really need to read before you die. Saul Bellow is one such author, and The Victimshould probably have been included only in the 2002 books list. But at least it's short.
The Victim, by Saul Bellow
In a general way, anyone could see that there was great unfairness in one man’s having all the comforts of life while another had nothing. But between man and man, how was this to be dealt with? Any derelict panhandler or bum might buttonhole you on the street and say, “The world wasn’t made for you any more than it was for me, was it?” The error in this was to forget that neither man had made the arrangements, and so it was perfectly right to say, “Why pick on me? I didn’t set you up any more than you did.” Admittedly there was a wrong, a general wrong. Allbee, on the other hand, came along and said, “YOU!” and that was what was so meaningless. For you might feel that something was owing to the panhandler, but to be directly blamed was entirely different.
The antagonist is a stock character in literature and in life: a born loser who blames everybody but himself for his problems and who mooches off other people until they either stop giving or are all used up. He’s always just going to strike it rich. He has a sure thing going, if you’ll just lend him a few thousand in seed money, and he’s just going to stop drinking, and he has bad luck and no breaks and everyone’s out to get him but if you’ll just give him what he needs when the last 20 people said no, then he’ll do fine, and if you say no and he fails then you’re responsible for his failure for the rest of both your lives.
In Bellow’s book, this particular loser was on his very last chance at his job, when the protagonist asked him for an interview with the boss several years ago, ended up having an argument with the boss, and the loser ended up fired in the kerfluffle. And so the loser, who happens to be the descendant of 19th century WASP big shots and thinks he’s naturally better than everyone else, starts following the protagonist, who happens to be a slightly paranoid New York Jew in the 1950s with his own professional and financial problems, invites himself into the guy’s home, keeps hinting at how the guy owes him something, how he arranged to get him fired on purpose, as revenge for his antisemitism, and takes advantage of him again and again, the way this type of jerk always does.
And the Jewish guy lets him do it. Because, hey, what can you do? Maybe it really was all his fault after all. And maybe he’ll go away once he gets what he wants.
It’s supposed to gradually dawn on the reader that the loser, who bawls all the time about what a victim he is, might not really be the victim. To me, it was obvious immediately. I had the same problem with this book that I had with Before the Fact (Bookpost, February 2012): it goes too far. The protagonist/real victim willingly participates in his own destruction to such an extent that it becomes difficult to sympathize with him. Eventually, he’s suffering from his own choices.
This is Bellow’s second novel; in his later years, he considered it a training exercise. And yet, on the cover blurb, VS Pritchett lauds it as the greatest thing to come along in a whole generation, which was a pretty silly thing to say in the age of Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, and the rest of America’s Golden Age authors. Even so, I found it more emotionally compelling than Bellow’s much better known works Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March (Bookpost, November 2010). It’s short enough to be worthwhile.
The Victim, by Saul Bellow
In a general way, anyone could see that there was great unfairness in one man’s having all the comforts of life while another had nothing. But between man and man, how was this to be dealt with? Any derelict panhandler or bum might buttonhole you on the street and say, “The world wasn’t made for you any more than it was for me, was it?” The error in this was to forget that neither man had made the arrangements, and so it was perfectly right to say, “Why pick on me? I didn’t set you up any more than you did.” Admittedly there was a wrong, a general wrong. Allbee, on the other hand, came along and said, “YOU!” and that was what was so meaningless. For you might feel that something was owing to the panhandler, but to be directly blamed was entirely different.
The antagonist is a stock character in literature and in life: a born loser who blames everybody but himself for his problems and who mooches off other people until they either stop giving or are all used up. He’s always just going to strike it rich. He has a sure thing going, if you’ll just lend him a few thousand in seed money, and he’s just going to stop drinking, and he has bad luck and no breaks and everyone’s out to get him but if you’ll just give him what he needs when the last 20 people said no, then he’ll do fine, and if you say no and he fails then you’re responsible for his failure for the rest of both your lives.
In Bellow’s book, this particular loser was on his very last chance at his job, when the protagonist asked him for an interview with the boss several years ago, ended up having an argument with the boss, and the loser ended up fired in the kerfluffle. And so the loser, who happens to be the descendant of 19th century WASP big shots and thinks he’s naturally better than everyone else, starts following the protagonist, who happens to be a slightly paranoid New York Jew in the 1950s with his own professional and financial problems, invites himself into the guy’s home, keeps hinting at how the guy owes him something, how he arranged to get him fired on purpose, as revenge for his antisemitism, and takes advantage of him again and again, the way this type of jerk always does.
And the Jewish guy lets him do it. Because, hey, what can you do? Maybe it really was all his fault after all. And maybe he’ll go away once he gets what he wants.
It’s supposed to gradually dawn on the reader that the loser, who bawls all the time about what a victim he is, might not really be the victim. To me, it was obvious immediately. I had the same problem with this book that I had with Before the Fact (Bookpost, February 2012): it goes too far. The protagonist/real victim willingly participates in his own destruction to such an extent that it becomes difficult to sympathize with him. Eventually, he’s suffering from his own choices.
This is Bellow’s second novel; in his later years, he considered it a training exercise. And yet, on the cover blurb, VS Pritchett lauds it as the greatest thing to come along in a whole generation, which was a pretty silly thing to say in the age of Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, and the rest of America’s Golden Age authors. Even so, I found it more emotionally compelling than Bellow’s much better known works Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March (Bookpost, November 2010). It’s short enough to be worthwhile.