Two weeks ago, I reviewed Saul Bellow's Seize the Day. I've been reading his Collected Stories (1951-1990). The introduction says this of Bellow, and I think it's true:

One might say  that Bellow reprieved realism for a generation, the generation that came after the second world war, that he held its neck back from the blade of the postmodern; and he did this by revivifying traditional realism with modernist techniques. His prose is densely realistic, yet it is hard to find in any of the usual conventions of realism or even of storytelling. His people do not walk out of the house and into other houses — they are, as it were, tipped from one recalled seeing to another — and his characters do not Obviously dramatic conversations. It is almost impossible to find in the stories sentences along the lines of "he put down his drink and left the room." These are at once traditional and very untraditional stories, both archaic and radical.

I'm ashamed that I didn't even notice this while reading the stories. He writes careful descriptions of the people, their thoughts, any unusual or significant things they see, their reactions, but almost nothing about the rooms or the cars they are in.

What is obvious is the similarities between the stories. I only read four of them, but they all went something like this: The narrator is a Jew, from Brooklyn or Chicago. He is old, probably his family's last survivor of his generation, probably dying. (There is always a death, usually two.) He is probably an intellectual, a writer or a professor. He thinks back and recalls the events of one day in his youth. He lists all the members of his family, how Jewish they are, how they make their money, and how much money they make. There is a female relative, somewhat older than him, who is short and fat and mean, but nice to him. There is an older male relative who became a success in some kind of business and is now the family patriarch, respected but also resented. There is an older male relative with energy and vitality who has plenty of sex with good-looking women. These last two may be the same person. The narrator thinks about sex but never gets any. At some point the relative with vitality takes the narrator somewhere in a car (there is always a car, or at least a streetcar) and leaves him there while he goes into a building, where he stays for a long time. Later the narrator realizes it was a brothel. There is an incident or conflict in the second half of the story, and this is the part that makes the stories different. If people outside the family were involved, we will be told what country each of them is from. Nobody is born in America, except Jews, who are American, but Jewish first. The incident is connected with his family and with a death. The boy reflects on it, then the old man telling the story reflects on being that boy. He is unhappy with his life. He has earned the respect of his family with his intellectual work, but he wishes he had been the businessman who made a lot of money, or the vital man who screwed a lot of women, though he doesn't say any of this. Then the story ends.

So every Saul Bellow story is, probably, Saul Bellow's autobiography, expressing his regret at becoming a writer instead of making a lot of money and screwing a lot of women, wrapped around a story about family and death. The funny thing is that he spend 40 years writing these stories about regretting his wasted life as a writer.

The preface, by his wife, describes the gradual development of one of the stories, "The Bellarosa Connection". It's only about 25,000 words, but he worked on it full-time every day for about a month, just to write one first draft, then start over and write a second first draft of it.

I wish I could read the stories and figure out  the author's style. Some people can just look at things and see the style. Those are people who have style. I tried reading style magazines for one year. The had page after page of photographs of things that were stylish that year, without a word of explanation or even a counter-example; the reader was supposed to intuit the rules of style from those pictures. I never could learn one damned thing about style from them. I don't seem to be able to do any better at picking up style from writers. Since I'm left with nothing but the story, I don't think I'm going to finish this book. I already know that Saul Bellow wished he had had more sex instead of becoming a world-famous writer, and this is not encouraging for a man wanting to become a writer.

I'm reading another famous literary yet non-modernist writer, Philip Roth, and it might not be coincidence that he's also Jewish. A storytelling culture may provide the strength to resist literary trends.