Saul Bellow begins "A Silver Dish" by focusing on Woody Selbst, the protagonist, at age sixty. He is a successful businessman, the owner of a tile distribution company, living alone in an apartment on the top floor of his company warehouse. It is Sunday morning, and the bells are ringing in churches all around the South Chicago neighborhood where he lives. Woody reflects on the death of his father, Morris "Pop" Selbst, earlier in the week. He thinks of other people in his life: his mother, whose conversion to Catholicism hastened her husband's abandonment; his two weak-willed sisters, who are in their fifties and still living with their mother; his wife, from whom he has been separated for fifteen years, and Helen, his mistress; and Halina, the woman for whom his father left the family when.....
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