Seize the Day presents a character who is caught up in the impersonal American quest for money and success, yet who cannot ignore his own need for personal respect and compassion. A middle-aged Tommy Wilhelm is faced with the need to make money and to avoid looking like a failure, yet he longs for the solace of his father’s approval. Tommy wants to listen to his heart, to trust even when that trust is foolish, as in his relationship with Dr. Tamkin. Tommy is an example of the long-suffering sensitive victim who, despite life’s hardships, remains basically noble in a fragmented world. Tommy’s plight is darkly comic—the poor soul who succumbs to the wiles of the fast-talking con artist and who is ultimately bereft of everything.

Tommy is a representative example of Saul Bellow’s typical hero, a man trapped in the contradiction between desire and limitation, aspiration and ability. Such a hero experiences a conflict between head and heart. He is unable to reconcile the disparity between knowing and feeling. Tommy knows, for example, that Tamkin is not to be trusted, but he wants in his heart to trust him. Tommy sees his father’s mean-spiritedness and contempt, but he wants his father’s sympathy nevertheless.

Characteristically, Bellow depicts this contradiction not in naturalistic terms, as in the works of many of his contemporaries, but from a distinctly comic point of view. In this connection it is interesting to note that Bellow himself translated from the Yiddish the famous short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Gimpel the Fool” (1953), a work spiritually akin to Bellow’s point of view. Gimpel is the schlemiel, the loser with a soul, whose place in heaven is assured by his genuine humility, his acceptance of the essential holiness of life. Bellow’s typical hero is, like Tommy, an intellectual schlemiel, aggrieved by the madness of contemporary life but unable to submit to it with the serenity of Gimpel. Tommy suffers, like Gimpel, not only because the world is pitiless and mad but also because he refuses to accept its madness, striving, instead, for some humanistic ideal. He wants sympathy; he demands it as a human being. He is thwarted by his father’s heartlessness and by Tamkin’s deceit.

Seize the Day is rich in character portrayals. Tamkin is a mix of the comic and the villainous. He cheats Tommy not only out of his money but also out of his beliefs in the possibility of honesty. Dr. Adler, whose name in German means “eagle,” is a kind of predator, preying on his son’s weakness as a way of nourishing his own self-image. Lofty, aristocratic, fiercely aloof, Adler divorces himself from human feelings.

In its concision, its taut depiction of character and event, and in its total immersion in its New York locale, Seize the Day is one of Bellow’s outstanding novels. It serves as a good introduction to his work, containing the essential theme of the hero in moral conflict with the values of his society and told in a prose that combines erudition with slang, the analytically precise with the casually colloquial.