SOURCE: Dickstein, Morris. “Spectacles of Personality.” Times Literary Supplement (18 January 2002): 29.

In the following favorable reviews, Dickstein provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of the works in Collected Stories.

Just as we have had an American E. M. Forster who, as first interpreted by Lionel Trilling, was more timeless and universal, less grounded in his social origins than the British version, there now seems to be a British Saul Bellow who bears small resemblance to the American original. While critics at home have concentrated on Bellow's material—the offbeat Jewish characters, the Roman candle of deep thoughts, the often bitter jeremiads against modern culture—his British admirers, led by the reverential Martin Amis, have drawn attention to the sheer spin of his inventive sentences. By extracting Bellow from his own polemics and from the ethnic ghetto of Jewish-American writing, they offer a challenging if partial view of work that...