Deep, insightful, but just bleak enough not to be enjoyable. I remember as a child the horror stories about life behind the iron curtain, and here it all is again. The pettiness, the listlessness, and the constant fear of the surveillance state, all taken as banal givens by the subject and primary narrator of this novel.

The intense loneliness and longing for human connection just ooze out of every page of this book. It seems that academic and professional achievement do nothing to satisfy in this regard, and home is just as bad as foreign soil. Capitalism is just as morally bankrupt as communism, so where does that leave us?

Bellow doesn’t offer a lot of hope, but he doesn’t offer it pretty brilliantly.