A genre has long since defined itself, Nobel-certified: the Saul Bellow Novel. This is the Novel as First-Draft Dissertation: a rumination on the sorry state of the world, insufficiently formal for the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, however well it may translate into Swedish, but not unworthy of that Committee's encouraging noises. About the sorry state of the world there is nothing to be done save accept it, as every Bellow protagonist must learn for himself the way Job did. And since the Bellow Novel is obdurately protagonist-centered, what the reader gets to do is share his learning process.

In The Dean's December, the Dean—not a Jewish Dean from the Bellow Repertory Company, not at bottom an echt dean at all but a mere dean of students, moreover a moon-faced French-Irish ex-newspaperman named Albert Corde who has drifted into academe, and don't confuse...