Skewed Views
The Baltimore Sun on Saul Bellow, who died April 5, and women:
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice McDermott said she most admires the way that Mr. Bellow carefully structured his novels and short stories.
“He’s a writer’s writer,” she said…. “There’s a classical shape to everything he writes, and that gives his novels and stories an air of inevitability….”
…. In spite, or perhaps because, of all the praise, Mr. Bellow also had detractors…. Critic Alfred Kazin thought the author had become a “university intellectual” with “contempt for the lower orders.”
Even Ms. McDermott said she had to “park my feminism at the door” while reading Mr. Bellow’s work.
“Despite all my resistance to his characters’ worldview, through his prose he’s able to let you enter fully into the life of this white, Jewish intellectual who has a skewed view of women,” she said.
A great woman artist on skewed views:
“That’s what you’re supposed to do as an artist. We’re not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that,” [Julie] Taymor said. “We’re here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That’s what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you’re not painting an exact reproduction….”
Finally, a skewed view
of Pope John Paul II in Paradise:
