MOSBY'S MEMOIRS AND OTHER STORIES

Six very various short stories, involving life styles and searches of one kind or another. Only in the title story are there some of the abrasive, dissonant vibrations of Herzog, as an elderly and quite parched professor on a Guggenheim remembers and ruminates, trying "to avoid the common fate of intellectuals," spooked by aspects of his own death in life. A scientist, Dr. Braun, views himself and reviews his past via two cousins and a feud which ends with an extortionate deathbed forgiveness; an old woman of 72, obdurate, scrappy, cheerful, careless, finds that everything she still has (not much) is as worthless as she is; a white clerk delivering relief checks faces the solidarity of silence when "Looking for Mr. Green" in a Chicago Negro Slum, and an American, searching for "The Gonzaga Manuscripts"— of a dead Spanish poet — confronts another closed society. "A Father-to-Be" the least successful, finds a young man and good provider overwhelmed by his responsibilities. . . . .In none of them, except the first, is Mr. Bellow at his assertive best, but the stories are catchy commentaries on life, enlivened by Mr. Bellow's shrewd and sympathetic intelligence.