There, Freedman teaches political theory and Bellow conducts a course on the European novel. Freedman persuaded him to go on a holiday in the Caribbean to relax after the move. While there, Bellow ate a toxic red snapper and almost died. Surviving his own near-death was the push he needed to discharge his final obligation to his friend Bloom. The novel, which begins as a lusty, sometimes ribald portrait of Bloom, quickly becomes a poignant essay on friendship and mortality.
Writers are high priests of the literary art of seduction and betrayal.
They have to be. Plundering intimacies and expropriating secrets provide the raw materials of their craft. For Bellow, make that with audio. He writes as though he is talking directly to you, the reader, with all the digressions and indiscretions that make for stimulating conversation. If overwrought sensibilities and vanities get trashed in the process, it is nothing more than a necessary byproduct of his art.