“There was a time when people were in the habit of addressing themselves frequently and felt no shame at making a record of their inward transactions.”
This is a reread from a few years ago. This novel takes place in 1941 and is specifically in the form of a diary by a man who is married and somewhat disheveled at the soul-level. What this means here is a feeling of unease and displacement as he goes through his days. The specific nature of this displacement is his caught-between feeling of being in the United States, but also feeling that any day now he will be drafted to go to war. He hasn’t yet, and it’s not exactly that he wants to, but he can’t but help feel that it’s both inevitable and a sense of obligation, duty, and even rite of passage. The novel itself is rather anxiety-ridden. It’s also a first novel, and feels that way. Saul Bellow is only two novels and some short stories away from writing The Adventures of Augie March, which also feels a bit like a first novel, but a very different kind.
The other thing about this novel is that it tips its hands a few times in terms of how it sees itself. There’s a direct reference at one point to a character being like a specific minor character from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. But that’s almost a feint, as the clear connection here is to Notes from Underground, whose reprehensible narrator is much more aligned with our narrator here.