Mr. Sammler’s Planet

A tall old man, blind in one eye, born in Cracow but with Oxonian manners and the face of a British Museum reader, strides lightly and recklessly, rolled umbrella pointing, through the pages of Saul Bellow's new novel.

Mr. Artur Sammler, who looks back on the civilized pleasures of England in the twenties and thirties, on an acquaintance with Bloomsbury and H.G. Wells, but also on the camps, the wear, a death ditch in Poland, is above all a man who has lasted. Moving now through the chaotic and dangerous streets of New York's upper West Side, Mr. Sammler is attentive to everything, appalled by nothing. He brings the same curiosity and disinterestedness to the activities of a black pickpocket observed in an uptown bus as to the details of his niece Angela's sex life, to his daughter's lunacy as to the extraordinary theories of one Dr. V. Govinda Lal on the use we are to make of the moon now that we have reached it.

Is it time to go? Sammler asks dispassionately. Are we to blow this great blue, white, green planet or be blown from it? Under the comedy and sadness, the shocking force of much of the action, and the superb character-drawing of this brilliantly written novel runs a strain of speculation, both daring and serene, on the future of life on this planet, Mr. Sammler's planet, and any other planets for which we may be destined.