Bellow's A SILVER DISH

"And that fine Swedish immigrant Aase (Osie, they pronounced it), who had been the Skoglunds’ cook and married the eldest son to become his rich, religious widow—she supported the Reverend Doctor. In her time she must have been built like a chorus girl. And women seem to have lost the secret of putting up their hair in the high basketry fence of braid she wore. Aase took Woody under her special protection and paid his tuition at the seminary. And Pop said . . . But on this Sunday, at peace as soon as the bells stopped banging, this velvet autumn day when the grass was finest and thickest, silky green: before the first frost, and the blood in your lungs is redder than summer air can make it and smarts with oxygen, as if the iron in your system was hungry for it, and the chill was sticking it to you in every breath—Pop, six feet under, would never feel this blissful sting again. The last of the bells still had the bright air streaming with vibrations."

In this particular passage from Bellow's story, we see several stylistic elements come into play to make the passage read almost like prose-poetry akin to something from Virginia Woolf in The Waves or any novel by Nabakov. The passage, like so many others in Bellow's story, is episodic and digressive, almost conversational, and Bellow's particular choice of words allows a rhythm that otherwise wouldn't be possible, for example, " And women seem to have lost the secret of putting up their hair in the high basketry fence of braid she wore." The combination of the words in "hair in the high basketry fence of braid she wore" sounds almost Shakespearian, invoking not only a funny image of an outmoded hair-style, but bringing a special baroque vocabulary to fit the situation, specifically, "basketry fence of braid".

At the middle point of the paragraph, an important shift in tone occurs when the narrative is taken off of its digression and forwarded through time to the present, where we remember, along with the narrative itself, that Pop is dead, "And Pop said . . . But on this Sunday, at peace as soon as the bells stopped banging..." The narrative at many points gets off of the main focus, but at certain points (this being one of them), the story totally regains focus with this realization of Pop's absence.

Bellow's conversational/diversionary/ digressive narrative style is very much reminds me of earlier Philip Roth, particularly Portnoy's Complaint and The Breast, which is to say, the "narrative voice" (whatever that is) is more playful or at least more limber and flexible than a writer like Hemingway (to use an extreme). Hemingway hides things from us, whereas Roth and Bellow are telling us all about whatever it is they're talking about, and so elements often seen as peripheral in stories (episodic, digressive, etc.) really come together to give the story meaning and pace, much like Moby Dick which was itself widely varied in different stylistic elements, making it (like Bellow, Roth, Faulkner, et al) an experience that couldn't be achieved in totally orthodox modes of storytelling, i.e. linear structure, concrete conclusions, etc.