Saul Bellow slipped off my reading life some years ago, perhaps carried away by the same current that dulled my interest in Philip Roth. I thought it a passing disenchantment. It may have been something else.

Reading Gabriel Josipovici’s essay on Bellow in The Lessons of Modernism recalled what had first drawn me in: a voice that combined “the utmost formality with the utmost desperation.”

“Bellow,” Josipovici writes, “is too important a writer to have this done to him”, meaning the easy placement into literary categories, the smoothing-over of that desperate, exacting voice.

All Bellow’s novels, Josipovici suggests, could be called Dangling Man.

It is with Dangling Man that I will return to him. No project, no list. Only a way of listening again, without the noise of admiration or disenchantment.