It was Bellow I kept coming back to as I wrestled with Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, a collection of seven stories sprawling across three hundred mostly dazzling, occasionally enervatingpages. The worlds themselves of course are still there (or in the next neighborhood over), tough and teeming as they ever were. Or rather, Eastern European Jews have vanished from them. Stories like “Cousins,” “The Bellarosa Connection,” and “The Old System”-one of the best stories ever written about the mixed blessing of assimilation-paint indelible portraits of lives lived without safety or privacy, in hardscrabble, close-quartered, teeming worlds that have long since vanished. The famously autobiographical Augie,for example, opens with one of the great fibs in American literature: “I am an American, Chicago born.” In fact, the Bellows moved there when Saul, né Solomon, was nine years old. Moreover, Bellow’s stories often find him mining his early, formative experiences as the child of Lithuanian and Russian Jewish émigrés in Quebec, and then as a young immigrant himself. I readily rank his Collected Stories up there with Herzog and Augie March at the apex of the Bellow canon-assuming, which I suppose I shouldn’t, that such a thing still exists. They’re almost all novella-length, but even so, the limit imposed by the form provides a propitious counterforce to Bellow’s natural maximalism, and the results feel simultaneously epic and economical. I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I’ve always felt that Saul Bellow did some of his finest work in the short story.
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