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The reviews of this book seem to split the readers into people who vaguely identify with the fatuous intellectual and those who react and judge from a distance. I identify with him. Joseph is a Bellow protagonist who doesn't bluster larger than life like Henderson or isn't excessively snobby and removed, an alien from another generation like Sammler. He is a dabbling intellectual who judges doers from afar and is poisoned by the intersection of his own lack of initiative or concrete movement toward achievement, his lack of daily responsibilities, and the fact that the men around him are realizing their potential through sacrificing themselves. His reasoning is serpentine in its self delusion. As a person, he is half baked and at a crossroads. He obscures the fact that his choices are simple, to act and join the war effort, growing up through extinction, to obscure himself from the war and make his living some other way, possibly as a scholar, or to moulder on his wife's support. He distances himself from this wife, the one he tries to "mold" into a teachable image and the friends who alchemically reveal each others weaknesses at parties. The prospect of war and idleness erodes the "good man" image he cultivated in the past, revealing a primal rage and ugly traits. He is smart enough to judge and understand, but not talented or willful enough to create himself. His thoughts hum along disjointed and verbose, with their pithy, beautiful reflections of Chicago tableaus and their jottings of discursive ideas. The journal serves as a snippet, a snapshot in Joseph's life as it teeters on adulthood and/or extinction.

Joseph is a middling character, he has likeable and unlikeable traits. His intellectual musings don't have the heft of someone who successfully presents their thoughts to the public for a living. He has little right to judge those like Alf Steidler who actually showcase their ability to entertain, or his brother Amos who attempts to act in order to live and gain money for his family. Reviewers say he is solipsistic. I say that he has little connection to a wife he seems to have loved for what he could make out of her. One who he lives with, but seems not to love, like, or even hear anymore other than as a tottering feminine child who disturbs his thoughts. He is not compassionate to his friends and doesn't reach out to them with a quid pro quo to break his mental isolation.

Bellow, like Joseph, demonstrates potential in this first novel. To reflect humming thought, intellectual discourse, and reflections on culture at large while moving plot along. The beautiful sleight of hand and choice of detail in describing passing city images. Bellow allows the uncertain, changing thought process of the intellectual man to murkily reflect an understanding of culture during his time. My thought is chatty in this way, with ephemeral arguments, written and re-written as I gain experience. It takes little imagination or suspension of disbelief to fall into the thought processes of Bellow's more believable characters, particularly Joseph. I am just as solipsistic if not more, my thoughts and ideas rise, crest, and break on each other no less, and I am constantly reformatting my view on the world. Joseph's life is an unfinished, continued script like the book, which doesn't end in a satisfying way other than threatening extinction.