No, it was Billy acting alone on a spurt of feeling for his fellow Jews and squaring himself to outwit Hitler and Himmler and cheat them of their victims. On another day he'd set his heart on a baked potato, a hot dog, a cruise around Manhattan on the Circle Line. . . . Billy was as spattered as a Jackson Pollock painting, and among the main trickles was his Jewishness, with other streaks flowing toward secrecy - streaks of sexual weakness, sexual humiliation. At the same time, he had to have his name in the paper. As someone said, he had a buglike tropism for publicity.
Fools ought to come in smaller sizes.
This is vintage Bellow, fluent and racy in its presentation of excess, right down to the too many stripes of those ''idiotically flashy'' shirts. Mr. Bellow's previous book, ''A Theft,'' was a traditional third-person narrative with a relatively faceless storyteller who refrained from imposing an individual slant on characters and events. This made for a somewhat flat or muted effect, not one for which Mr. Bellow is usually noted. The novel is filled with such metaphors for its own secret operation. In fact it is Fonstein's wife, Sorella, who increasingly absorbs the narrator's attention, especially as she attempts to bend Billy Rose to her will.