It would be a dereliction of duty not to mention that Humboldt’s Gift has boring parts. It contains lots of internal monologue essays, and they are not all interesting. Some little thing happens, and the protagonist thinks about it for a while. Then another little bit of action happens, followed by more thinking. The characters spend a lot of time summarizing each other’s behavior out loud to each other.

It has to be that way; he couldn’t have constructed it otherwise. But that doesn’t solve the tiresomeness.

In fact, as I read I started to notice the essay sections repeating. And then I noticed that events were usually repeated as well. They happened, and then were recollected later. Or else they were predicted, and then later they happened.

This was also a necessary element of the construction. Because Charlie Citrine, the protagonist, is Kierkegaard’s aesthetic person. And Humboldt’s Gift is Either/Or plus Repetition, fictionalized. Complete with judges scolding a man about marriage.

The fundamental character of the aesthete is reflection. He flees into possibility. The protagonist doesn’t so much live as think about living. He’s aesthetic down to the soles of his feet. Actuality is only important to him as a jumping-off point for theorizing and poetry.

It’s not that the novel refers to Kierkegaard. It’s that the novel is a morality play and Kierkegaardian existentialism is the moral of the it. Even the key thing, Humboldt’s gift itself, what the novel is named after, is a retelling of Repetition.

For a Kierkegaard-lover like myself, the book is a disappointment. Citrine should make a decisive step. A leap of faith. He should launch himself into absurdity like a rocket! The leap of faith has to represent a distinct incongruity between two lives. Nothing before it makes sense in light of what comes after it.

Instead there’s some hand-waving intellectualizing about faith and absurdity. That’s just more reflective aesthetic life. As it is, with his spiritualistic attempt to commune with the dead, he gets a little closer to the ethical. That’s an improvement. That’s character development. But nothing in the book comes anywhere close to approaching the spiritual.

One oddity of the novel is that there’s no suspense until the very end. Citrine floats along uncaring for the first 9/10 of the plot. Most of the novel covers less than a week, and then the last few chapters cover three or four months. And in those last chapters, Bellow introduces some suspense, finally. I think it’s because the protagonist takes on the ethical a bit, and finally starts to care about the world.

Bellow may be using that to say something about time. That it flows differently for the aesthetic versus the ethical, maybe.

It’s well written, but even if you have an interest in the life of the mind it depicts, Humboldt’s Gift can be pretty dull.

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