Boredom as a Political Weapon

Only one Saul Bellow novel has ever been filmed: Seize the Day, with Robin Williams, which Bellow himself co-wrote, and hated. The others are impossible to imagine as movies. Think of Herzog, the main action of which is a man thinking about writing letters (which are never sent) to friends and celebrities, an act of self-therapy and secular confession. There is a car chase of sorts at the end. But it’s a story that takes place in the head, mostly. Humboldt’s Gift, too, the book which brought Bellow the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, in which the main character, Charlie Citrine, mostly thinks about but never quite gets around to writing a long essay on boredom. No car chase.

“We are told much and shown little in the course of the narrative,” John Updike wrote of Bellow’s 1982 novel, The Dean’s December, as quoted in the second volume of Zachary Leader’s detailed and confident biography of Bellow, “and if Bellow’s eye is still magical his...