Herzog and Edmund Wilson

The NY Times Book Review also had an article about Edmund Wilson and draws an interesting connection between Wilson and Saul Bellow, saying that "Writing a biography of Edmund Wilson is like taking one of Saul Bellow's better-known protagonists and reducing him to a sober set of themes." Apparently Bellow and Wilson had some kind of mutual effect on each other, with Bellow dropping in on Wilson's classes at the University of Chicago or listening to him lecture at Princeton. The Times notes "the sheer passionate untidiness of Wilson's personal life" as belonging to a Bellow's novel, and that would certainly fit in with what I've read so far in Herzog. I'd been thinking that what Bellow achieved in Herzog is an amazingly complex portrait of a person, and it's done in a unique and subtle fashion. Through painstaking accumulation of detail, action and emotion, the man, Herzog, takes shape in our minds, almost as a real person might after several meetings start to impress his or her personality upon us.