Boxing writers sometimes try to make comparisons across weight groups. They used to say, for example, that Floyd Mayweather was the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world. Saul Bellow for many years has had the reputation of the best page-for-page writer. Every paragraph has something that arrests you: an image, an insight, a line of dialogue, or a moral dilemma.
This is the kind of thing: ‘My brother picked me up by the trustful affections as one would lift up a rabbit by the ears.’ The sentences flow, both natural and vivid. Bellow can capture the moment’s peace of a commercial traveller, sitting in the garden of his lover’s rented apartment:
He breathed in the sugar of the pure morning.
He heard the long phrases of the birds.
No enemy wanted his life.
Or tell you how to eat an English muffin in a Chicago diner: ‘Torn not cut,’ a woman tells the waitress, so the edges burn a little and grow crunchy.
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