Who Brought The European Novel of Ideas to America?

 Very well, not a question of great interest to many, but while reading ‘Mr. Sammler’s Planet’: Saul Bellow’s howl of rage I found this at its opening:

Saul Bellow introduced the European novel of ideas into American literature.  Like a brilliant talker, he takes all human knowledge for his province.  In the 1960s his moral, intellectual and literary values were violently attacked.  Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Bellow’s “Decline of the West”, contrasts the ideal standards of his youth with the corruption of contemporary life.  His entertaining and provocative howl of rage is a tour de force of disillusionment and disgust at the descent from high culture to barbarism.  “New York,” he writes, “makes one think about the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world . . . with disintegration, with crazy streets, filthy nightmares, monstrosities come to life, addicts, drunkards, and perverts celebrating their despair openly in midtown.”

I admit to having had a jaundiced view of Saul Bellow since high school. I think he helped put me off of writing. I wish I had met Philip Roth first. So, bias disclosed.

Secondly, I read Mr. Sammler's Planet while in prison. I admit not remembering much, other than a sense it belonged to its time (a feeling I had of John Updike's Rabbit Run.)

However, I recall no recollections or feelings of recollections that there was much in the way of ideas. The European novel of ideas I equate with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

I believe the first American novel to come close to Mann's work is Ross Lockrdge Jr's Raintree County.

Ross Lockridge, Jr., inspired by Walt Whitman, created a mythical county, like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, that is meant to stand as a keystone in the universe. Lockridge explores war, politics, religion, utopianism, romanticism, sex, slavery — virtually every aspect of the American experience to create his entry into the Great American Novel sweepstakes. 

Yep.  Lockridge was in print before Bellow published The Adventures of Augie March. Whatever ideas Bellow put forth in the few books I ahve read of his, did not resonate with me as did what Lockridge wrote. There are no strawmen in the dialogs of Raintree County. There may be no pronouncements of unmitigated virtue, either.

sch 5/19/24