[Bellow] is actually not a novelist at heart but an essayist disguised as a writer of fiction. In Seize the Day, The Adventures of Augie March, and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow makes serious use of fictional techniques, but even there the essayist-lecturer is always ready to step in, stealing the stage from the fictional characters to make the fiction more "important."
Bellow's self-indulgence takes various forms. On occasion it appears as stylistic fiddling—as language designed mainly to show off Bellow's gifts as philosopher, poet, mimic, or Jewish humorist—not aimed, as it should be, at clarifying action and character or at controlling the reader's attention and response, heightening his pleasure and understanding. When Bellow is feeling self-indulgent, his language, instead of sharpening effects, distracts the reader, calls attention to the writer and thus away from the story unfolding like a dream in the reader's mind. Fiction should go after understanding by creating characters who subtly embody values and who test them. with clear but inexpressible results, in action. Discursive thought is not fiction's most efficient tool; the interaction of characters is everything. But Bellow can almost never handle more than one character at a time (an exception, perhaps, is his creation of both Humboldt and Citrine in Humboldt's Gift), and that one major character, Bellow's surrogate, has always an inordinate love of talk. At every opportunity, Bellow leans his characters and action on some doorframe, turns off his fiction's clock, and from behind the mask of his hero expatiates. When the essay voice begins, we are asked to appreciate, mainly on the basis of the speaker's charm, a set of prejudices and opinions, or shrewd observations—it makes no great difference—that have nothing to do, directly, with the progress of the action or the values under test.
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