From the subtitle on—the reference is to a poem by Robert Frost—["Saul Bellow; Drumlin Woodchuck"] is surely one of the most eccentric biographical works since A.J.A. Symons' "The Quest for Corvo." I call it a biographical work because Mr. Harris has written more a quest for Bellow than a conventional biography. "For specific facts you must go to a certified public accountant," he declares, and his indifference to facts in this research-dominated age is an act of sheer bravado: He "believes" that Bellow is associated with the Committee on Social Thought; introduced to one of Bellow's girlfriends in a restaurant, he fails to catch the name: "Stat or Stats or Stap or Staps." After a decade of purported research, he writes the novelist: "I date this letter your birthday. It is one of the hard facts I have about you." Wrong again, he discovers: "His birthday was not July 10 but June 10."
But then, Mr. Harris isn't really a biographer by temperament. He is a novelist and, like so many other contemporary novelists, self-obsessed. The main character in this curious narrative, it seems at first, is the biographer himself, a grievance-prone academic brimming with self-contempt and in perpetual competition with his subject….
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