SOURCE: Cross, Richard K. “Clearing the Mind of Cant.” Modern Age 37, no. 3 (spring 1995): 251-54.

In the following favorable review, Cross surveys the range of essays in It All Adds Up.

Now in his eightieth year, Saul Bellow is our best living novelist, the principal heir among the writers who emerged after World War II to the great figures of the Hemingway-Fitzgerald-Faulkner generation. From the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, years that saw the appearance of Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, and Humboldt's Gift, no other novelist residing on these shores (Nabokov was living in Montreux for much of that time) could touch Bellow. Not much attention has been paid to his work apart from the fiction, although from the 1940s onward a steady stream of autobiographical reflections, evocations of place, and social criticism, as well as essays and lectures on the state of our...