James Atlas’ new biography of Saul Bellow has been winning critical praise everywhere. Well, almost everywhere: “Errors and confusions abound, as do misreadings of passages from Bellow’s correspondence, even while passages from his novels never receive the benefit of close interpretation or stylistic commentary. Atlas’s characterisations of Bellow are peculiarly static. From beginning to end he is framed in an unchanging posture, and defined by a very limited and limiting repertory of psychological labels and clichés.” – London Review of Books