SOURCE: Brown, John L. Review of It All Adds Up, by Saul Bellow. World Literature Today 69, no. 1 (winter 1995): 148-49.

In the following review, Brown asserts that the essays in It All Adds Up “reveal the richness and the variety, and occasionally the contradictions and the discursiveness, of the outstanding novelist of his brilliant generation.”

Does it all add up? Not really. For this collection [It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future], as Bellow himself implies, is just too scattered and heterogeneous. Its thirty-one essays (all previously published in periodicals such as Life, Holiday, and Esquire or given as lectures) span his entire career. The earliest, “Spanish Letter,” dates from 1948, four years after his first novel, Dangling Man. The last ones, “Writers, Intellectuals, and Politics” and an homage to William Arrowsmith, appeared in 1993. Closely linked with Bellow's fiction, they reveal the richness and the...