To explore the spectrum of the happiness, frustration, grief, and trauma generated by the search for love, Bellow offers a whole gallery of characters, each of whom illuminates a section of that broad range of experiences and emotions. The narrator, Kenneth Trachtenberg (this name may be Bellow's joke; Stanley Trachtenberg is a leading critic of the novelist's works), is a professor of Russian literature. Raised in Paris, he has returned to America, perhaps out of a masochistic desire to see his dreams of culture and a decent life shattered for good, perhaps to be near his uncle, Benn Crader, and certainly to be out of the glare of his sexually spectacular father, Rudi, who effortlessly attracts, couples with, and dismisses women. Kenneth's father is what males would like to be sexually (because he has so many women) but whom males also hate (because while each imagines his own...