style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">“Was I a man or a jerk?” Saul Bellow asked a friend shortly before his death. His eldest son’s memoir is a book too rich in ambivalence, anger, bafflement, tenderness and wishful thinking to give a clear answer. In fact, Greg Bellow sidesteps the question in ways that testify both to the complexity of the character of the Nobel Prize-winning author and to the enduring need of children – even grown-up ones – to find ways to believe in their parents’ goodness despite all the evidence against it.