The Victim (novel)
First edition
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| Author | Saul Bellow |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Vanguard Press 1947 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
The Victim is a novel by Saul Bellow published in 1947.
As in much of Bellow's fiction, the protagonist is a Jewish man in early middle age. Leventhal lives in New York City. While his wife is away on family business, Leventhal is haunted by an old acquaintance who unjustly claims that Leventhal has been the cause of his misfortune. The story explores the men's evolving relationship, all while Leventhal is struggling to deal with his own family problems.
Asa Leventhal's wife Mary has left the city for a few weeks in order to help her elderly mother move from Baltimore to her old family home in the South. While she is away, Leventhal must take on many tasks of caring for himself which his wife would ordinarily undertake for him. The action of the story begins when Leventhal is at his job as a copy-editor and receives a frantic phone call from his sister-in-law. She tells him that his nephew is terribly ill and that she desperately needs his assistance. During their conversation we learn that Asa's brother Max is a negligent husband and father who has practically abandoned his wife and two sons for itinerant work in Texas. His family subsists on the money he sends to them.
On his way to his brother's apartment, Leventhal reflects on the annoyance of being disturbed at work and the shameful treatment which Max is visiting upon his young family. But these reflections quickly take on a tone of self-reproach as Leventhal briefly admits to himself that he has allowed his obligation to this extended family to lapse inexcusably. Throughout the novel, Leventhal flirts with the possibility of widening his arc of responsibility to include humans other than himself and his wife. Usually, however, he finds a way to preserve his positive image of himself and to shirk responsibility for others.
This theme is expanded one evening when Leventhal, while walking in the park, is abruptly confronted by a man whose face he is unable immediately to place. Slowly, through conversation and subterfuge, the stranger reveals himself to be an old acquaintance named Kirby Allbee. Leventhal initially regards Allbee, who looks down on his luck, with a mixture of alarm and pity, but is swiftly put on guard, for Allbee's stream of false courtesy is barbed with anti-semitism, and it emerges that Allbee holds Leventhal responsible for his having lost his job at some point in the past.
As they stand there, Leventhal scrambles to recall the details of their acquaintance. He does recall Allbee's references to a party at which Allbee had angered Leventhal with anti-semitic remarks, and also that, while looking for a job himself, he had had a disastrous interview with Allbee's old boss. But Allbee has clearly become a 'crank' and a drunk, and Leventhal at first rejects out of hand Allbee's accusation that Leventhal's disastrous interview has lost him his job. Allbee asserts that Leventhal's angry behavior at the interview was deliberate provocation, payback for Allbee's anti-semitic remarks at the party, directed at Leventhal's close friend, Dan Harkavy, who had nonetheless contacted Allbee to help secure the disastrous interview for Leventhal.
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