Discussed in this essay: Bellow: A Biography, by James Atlas. Random House, 2000. 688 pages. $35.

The novelist Saul Bellow is many things to many people. To some, he is the self-made literary Bourbon who restored the soul to American letters; to others, the Jewish Jackie Robinson who smashed his own idiom through WASP exclusions. To still others, he is the wisecracking custodian of the best that has been thought and said; or the patient stylist in Flaubert’s line, laboring to make language a prehensile attachment to the eye. To my mind, this is all either piffle…