Contrary to the fond hopes of Hadassah chapters and JCC program chairpersons everywhere, Saul Bellow has never wanted to be viewed as a major American Jewish author. He sees himself as simply a writer, unqualified, unadorned, in the tradition of Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy, and the other classic exponents of fiction in the Western world. (Bellow is justifiably not known for his humility). The American urban scene, usually the beloved Chicago of his adolescence, is his stage, and the human condition, which in Bellow's reckoning often leaves much to be desired, is his theme. The vast majority of his characters are Jewish, either by his explicit declaration or by implication. Most of the time, they are alter egos of Bellow himself, of one of his friends, or of one of his wives; these latter two categories may be about equal in number, it seems. But Bellow says he writes in order to tell us about human beings, not just about Jews.

In this, the first full-length biography of Bellow – who is still among us, still sardonic, still crotchety, and still vigorous and a father again at age 85 – James Atlas examines Bellow's complicated relationship to Judaism, along with all the other paradoxes of Bellow's long and complicated life. Atlas, himself a Chicago-born writer a generation younger than Bellow, took ten years to produce this much-awaited book. This is not exactly an authorized biography of the author of Henderson the Rain King, The Adventures of Augie March, and Herzog, but it's not precisely unauthorized either. After circling around Bellow for years, interviewing the novelist's dwindling band of contemporaries, and reading Bellow's letters and unpublished works in libraries across the country, Atlas finally secured the aging author's grudging cooperation. In 1998, Bellow gave Atlas permission to quote from his letters. One of Bellow's sons later told the biographer that Bellow did this because he "realized that you weren't going to go away."

The result is a book that, despite its length, is never tedious. It reads like a novel in some ways, which is no surprise considering that many of Bellow's novels read like his autobiography. It seems to me that in the course of writing this biography, Atlas fell ever more in love with Bellow's work and grew ever more disillusioned with Bellow as a person. Simply put, Atlas grew tired of Bellow's bottomless self-pity, of his apparent incapacity to give unqualified love to another human being, of his compulsive womanizing, and of his constant whining. Atlas doesn't hesitate to psychoanalyze Bellow, blaming a good deal of the author's lifelong psychological difficulties on the early death of Bellow's mother from cancer and on Bellow's failure to deal appropriately with that loss. In his dealings with agents, publishers, wives, friends, and book reviewers, Bellow always found fault, always thought others had connived to gain the upper hand over him. As a Chicagoan who lived in New York for some of his life, Bellow enjoyed a curious love-hate relationship with the famous Manhattan Jewish intellectual crowd of the 1950s and 1960s. Atlas makes much of this. Sometimes Bellow envied the members of that rarefied circle, resenting them for never fully accepting him. Sometimes he singled out Lionel Trilling and other intellectuals as Jews who toadied to the WASP establishment; and later in his life he simply turned his back on that coterie and preferred to hang out in the coffee shops of Chicago with cronies he had known since high school.

"Bellow was a master of self-exculpation," Atlas writes. "He could always find an explanation –one that revolved around the notion of himself as victim. It was important for Bellow to see his life this way: He lacked the reserves of self-esteem needed to engage in rigorous self-criticism." The constant sexual affairs, the marriages that began with such hope and ended with such rancor and sometimes with court battles – none of that had anything to do with sex, says Atlas. It all had to do with insecurity. "Sex was never the driving impulse behind his conquests . . . [Women's] sexual aggressiveness was just another effort to impose upon his freedom – another demand."

Although Bellow was never religiously observant – had he ever confronted that option, he would no doubt have seen it too as impinging on his freedom – Atlas portrays him as a spiritual seeker whose novels touch on the core issues of the meaning of life and the inevitability of death. The idea of Judaism, though, seems to have had little direct relationship with Bellow's spiritual search. And unlike Philip Roth, Bellow did not set out to satirize the condition of Jews in the latter half of the twentieth century, nor was his goal to glorify or sentimentalize his people. For Bellow, being Jewish is simply part of who he is, as essential to his self-definition as being an American or a "Chicago boy." At times, Atlas writes perceptively, Bellow showed "an element of snobbery" in his "reluctance to affiliate himself with Jewish writers." Parodying the then-common linkage of himself, Roth, and Bernard Malamud, Bellow used to remark that he was part of the trilogy of "Hart, Schaffner and Marx."

In fact, however, Atlas points out that Bellow's work "was profoundly rooted in his identity as a Jew. His characters, so robustly American in their actions and appearance, were unmistakably Jewish in their sensibilities and the intonations of their speech."

After reading Bellow: A Biography the same might be said of Bellow himself. Throughout this book, James Atlas has not only conveyed Bellow's character, but Bellow's world.