Books: Victims Of Contemporary Life MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK

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Benn's story, that of a comfortably aging man pulled into the muck of life by an avid and avaricious young wife, was hilarious when Chaucer included it in The Canterbury Tales, and it still seems none the worse for wear. Bellow's contribution to this hoary tale lies in Kenneth's fumbling, long-winded ^ attempts to get it told. "I take very little pleasure in theories," he announces at the beginning, "and I'm not going to dump ideas on you." After incessant theorizing and idea dumping, he confesses toward the end, "As is evident by now, I have a weakness for the big issues."

These include his "East-West ideas," specifically the notion that the free-for-all liberation of modern democracies produces pain equally as noble and significant as that brought about by repressions in the Soviet bloc: "The sufferings of freedom also had to be considered. Otherwise we would be conceding a higher standard to totalitarianism, saying that only oppression could keep us honest." And Uncle Benn, a "sex-abused man," is not the only victim of contemporary life that Kenneth has in mind. "All this may appear to be about me," he disclaims at one point about his narrative, but much of it is. Kenneth too has a grievance. The woman with whom he had a daughter refused to marry him and moved to Seattle, where she now consorts with a burly ski instructor. "Keen to get to the bottom of things," as always, Kenneth ransacks his store of accumulated wisdom in an attempt to explain how he and his uncle have both wound up "knee-deep in the garbage of 'personal life.' "

The answer eludes him, and his quest points toward despair. Thoughts, he decides, "don't get us anywhere; our speculations are like a stationary bicycle." But Kenneth's huffing and puffing amount to an engrossing spectacle: a mind, albeit weird, attempting to make sense out of the overwhelming flood of data that most people dismiss as daily life. Despite, or perhaps because of, what the narrator calls "my divagations and aberrations, my absurdities," More Die of Heartbreak crackles with intelligence and wit. The novel is not only proof that Bellow, 72, can live up to his own standards; it is also a reminder of how diminished a thing postwar American fiction would have been without him.