Bellow: The Old System

Saul Bellow's 1967 story The Old System (republished in Mosby's Memoirs) is one of those multi-generational sagas that always feel a little underdone in the short-story format and about which you inevitably think: why not expand this into a novel? To which the answer is: if I did it would feel bloated and tedious and you'd say why not cut and edit this down to a short story?, and you're back where you started w two wasted years of work behind you. Well, the correct question in this day and age is: why not sell the rights and do this as a mini-series? That's not gonna happen of course w a 50-year-old property about a family of German-Jewish immigrants one of whom becomes a prosperous developer of low-rent housing and cheap urban shopping centers in Albany. But still... Anyway, this story, told from the unusual POV of the elderly and lonesome Dr Braun (a chemist not an md) reflecting on the complex inter-relationships of his much older and now deceased Braun cousins - a saga complete w childhood sexuality, family hatred a and rivalries - w the central event being the business deal that cousin Isaac put together involving a large cash bribe to a genteel wasp businessman to buy his country club for development into a shopping center; 3 of the siblings back out at the last minute , leaving Isaac to proceed and take on alone all of the risk - which he does, and this the beginning of his fortune and of the enmity of sister Tina, who feels cheated and bitter. This enmity lasts right up to Tina's death and involves some surprising twists and turns and some great scenes, including Isaac's visit to a Hasidic rabbi for advice and counsel and his meeting by chance many years later w the son of the man who took the bribe and sold him the country club. Maybe not Bellow's strongest story - a little difficult to follow the narrative drift compared w a story of a unified action such as Mr. Green, but it's, as noted above, like one of idiosyncratic and sometimes baggy novels in pill form.

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