Did you like Wilhelm? Did you care about his fate? Could you make sense of the rank hostility shown him by his wife and father? Did he do anything to deserve it, or was it just terrible luck that the only "loved ones" in his life were both cold-hearted creeps? Was Bellow attempting to say something about the American Male in mid-1950s America, just before the Women's Movement and the great tide of 1960s liberalism put their marks on the world?
(I found it interesting that Bellow painted the wife as a heartless power-monger who was making out like a bandit from the marital separation, bringing the hapless husband to financial ruin. I suppose that went on here and there, but overwhelmingly it was women who were financially and socially devastated by divorce in that era ... so, was the wife a monster or merely a realist insisting on her due?)
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No, I didn't like Wilhelm. But I did feel a little sorry for him, in spite of myself.
ReplyDeleteSomething that I found interesting was that nobody seemed to be enabling Wilhelm. Most of the people I know who encounter a lot of "bad luck" and are basically fuck-ups in life have a circle of people around them just waiting for the next opportunity to bail them out. Wilhelm didn't seem to have that. I have perhaps wrongly assumed that many of these people would eventually get their shit together if it weren't for the enablers.
I wondered about the depiction of the wife, too, but then I noticed that we only really hear about her from Wilhelm's point of view, plus Tamkin's "professional" opinion, which was bound to be sympathetic to Wilhelm. In her one appearance in the book, she seemed to be merely sensible, not greedy or evil.
I felt a little sorry for him, too, especially toward the end, not because he deserved pity necessarily but because he seemed so hopelessly clueless about how the world works.
ReplyDeleteWhat did you make of the dad, exactly? He wasn't an enabler, as you note, but there's that weird dynamic where a kid of his might seem doomed to failure because the parent's expectations are so high or vague. I wondered if this guy was capable of love even if his son grew up to be a successful surgeon or something. I mean, it seems in that case he could just be jealous. He really seemed to have no regard for anyone but himself and he almost appeared to take a sadistic delight in making people feel unworthy. I think Wilhelm inherited some of that self-centeredness, even though it takes on a kinder, gentler aspect in his own life.
Yeah, I agree that any child of Dr. Adler was probably doomed to failure. Most likely no success would have been good enough to earn his respect. It was sort of shocking to me how he seemed to feel nothing but disgust for his own son.
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