[Bellow is] amused by a crucifix (as if it were a toy without a history); and about sex he's a baby. But beyond this, one reads him with the seriousness one brings to the redemption of the garbage pile of one's own life. He mixes recklessness with a primordial awe, and his philosophic whine concentrates mainly on the petty, where we live. His perception of the unity of the human mind doesn't wash out its diversity. He uses language like a gill. Our worst writers (even when they are, in language, our best) write as if their own being were a one-shot affair, instead of an instance of a continuing history; solipsists, who want to be "original," bore because they don't believe in evil. Bellow, even when he is on the run from history, believes in history; and his whole fiction is a wrestling with the Angel of Theodicy. It's uncomfortable to read him because he doesn't allow a distance (as Chekhov does) between the rumpled spirits of his fiction and the reader, and because in this sense he isn't a "modern"; also he is argumentative and nags after a victory. All this means he is a real Voice.
What, in literature, is a Voice? A presence—a corpus of fine size—that can speak to its own generation because it has itself been spoken to by the generations before. (p. 66)
Cynthia Ozick, in The New York Times Book Review (© 1977 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), December 4, 1977.
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