Myron Magnet‘s essay on Saul Bellow‘s 1970 novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, is largely intended to bolster the case post-Giuliani crime reforms in New York—the piece appears in City Journal, published the conservative Manhattan Institute. Setting politics aside, though, the piece works well as a glimpse into how Bellow provoked arguments about class, race, and city life:
The novel’s personification of all that crime is a tall, powerfully built thief whom Sammler sees several times working the Riverside Drive bus, a dandified black man sporting a camel’s-hair coat, homburg, and Dior sunglasses. Sammler, slightly taller, can watch him over the heads of the other standees as he skillfully snaps open the handbags and methodically empties the purses of his unaware victims. One day, shielded from the other passengers by his broad, well-tailored back, the thief robs a weak old man with red-lidded eyes of “sea-mucus blue,” cowering in the bus’s back corner, his “false teeth dropping from his upper gums” in his terror. The thief pulls open the man’s jacket with its ragged lining, takes out his plastic wallet, and methodically rifles through the contents, pocketing the money and the Social Security check, while dropping the family photos like so much trash. Then, in a gesture of ironic contempt, he jerks the knot of the old man’s tie “approximately, but only approximately, into place.”
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