I felt a bit ashamed when Saul Bellow died recently to realize that I had never read a single one of his works. Somewhere or other, someone said that if you were to read just one of his books, you should probably pick Herzog. I had been hunting for it for a couple of weeks now, but all the bookstores near my house were pretty much sold out on all of Bellow's works. I finally found it at the bookstore at 30th Street Station (the train station) in Philly on the way to the airport. An interesting (but largely irrelevant) observation was that, while in flight, I came to a passage where Herzog is going to see a lawyer in the Burnham Building a block away from City Hall in Chicago. Upon reading that, I checked my hotel reservations for that night in Chicago, and saw that I was indeed booked to stay at the Burnham Hotel, which I discovered -- upon arriving at the hotel by cab -- was in fact about a block away from City Hall. Go figure.
In any event, I just finished the book and found it to be truly wonderful -- very moving and thoughtful. And it was so pleasant to read its ending, untainted by the modern-day conceit that true literature requires tragic endings. I can take my share of tragedy, but I've read enough modern-day books that were otherwise quite good but were ruined (at least for me) by the perceived need to kill someone off tragically.
I highly recommend the book, with the warning that many passages are quite dense. But then you suddenly find yourself transitioned into extraordinarily warm and touchingly personal passages that will reward you even if you don't enjoy the denser portions.