Seize the Day | Talking Heads: The Novels of Saul Bellow
In the following excerpt, Bower explains why he finds Seize the Day superior to other Bellow novels.
Bellow followed his longest novel with his shortest. Seize the Day (1956) is Bellow's most admirable work of fiction—concise, cogent, and finely controlled. Tommy Wilhelm is in his middle forties and is residing at the Hotel Gloriana on New York's Upper West Side, which is mostly occupied by elderly people, his physician father among them. Like Augie March, Tommy Wilhelm has energy—and it's done him nothing but harm. For years he tried to be a movie actor in Hollywood, but then "his ambition or delusion had ended," and he became a salesman, and now—that pursuit having failed...
[The entire page is 591 words long]
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