If there is a central thesis to the fiction of Saul Bellow, one of 20th-century literature's masters, it is that the cleverest people do the dumbest thing when it comes to relationships. In this 1987 classic, Benn Crader, an internationally famous botanist, has serious problems in the romance department. On becoming a widower he acquires a clutch of interested females. The most determined of these is Caroline, wealthy, eager but crazy Benn gets nervous and opts for Matilda, a terrifying beauty of Amazonian dimensions and the spoilt thirty something only child of pushy millionaries. Benn's sympathetic, equally messed-up nephew, Kenneth, an expert in Russian literature, tells the story. Only Bellow could have eminent academics speaking the snappy language of Chicago hoodlums. As wise, funny, moving and as random as you would expect.
