Bellow’s Herzog.  It stands as a towering literary achievement that is at once a mundane account of an intellectual dealing with his wife’s incomprehensible betrayal, and the tragic loss of his marriage and family life, and also a life-affirming manifesto about finding the strength and devotion to try to move on and rebuild one’s life after a divorce. Bellow chronicles the life of Moses Herzog, teacher, educator, husband and father, and his beautiful wife’s unhappiness and inability to forge a relationship with her caring husband.  They have a child that Moses adores, but Madelaine — his wife — seems only to respond to the larger than life, gregarious, neighbor Gersbach, who is animated, clownish, and partially lame, but strangely appealing to Madelaine.  

Madelaine is cold, calculating, and has not a drop of Herzog’s sensitivity, and she finds Gerbach liberating, unintellectual, fun, and exciting.  Gersbach sees her as another attractive woman suitable for his pleasure and much more attractive than his homely wife.  Madelaine and Gersbach find each other, and leave Moses heartbroken, particularly when his daughter is with Madelaine and Gersbach.  Terrible times for a father who was the victim in his divorce.  

Moses contemplates his existence when the structures he built are torn down.  His marriage and his family are destroyed, and his home in the Berkshires that he bought as a place for Madelaine and he to be alone to enjoy each other turned out to be suffocating for Madelaine.  The home was symbolic of their marriage — old, traditional, but in need of much repair that Moses was incapable of doing himself.  Moses felt deeply the weakening of the character of the modern age, and the loss of the values of the past.  Divorce was just something that a woman did to please herself — narcissism was the modern day religion, and that does not keep marriages together.  

Bellow was able to make his divorce a vehicle for exploring modern values and man’s place in a modern world without certitudes and without stable structures.  Bellow was ridiculed in some quarters for a pedantic, old-fashioned, male, but his book stands as a towering philosophical discussion of modern values.