The Chicago of today uses the slogan "The City That Works"—and, touring some really happening neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, and The Magnificent Mile, one can see why. It does seem to work, indeed; but we can't possibly imagine the Chicago of which we are given a glimpse in The Dean's December (Saul Bellow's first published novel after he won the Nobel Prize) adopting this motto. Not for a minute. What a difference twenty odd years makes! "The City That Mystifies and Infuriates" would be more accurate; and, yet, this would apply equally to the other city that is a principal setting of the novel—Bucharest, Rumania. What Bellow means for us to see is the consistency of the human element, even in two places so utterly different from each other.

In his book Philosophy of Art, the aesthetician Virgil Aldrich wrote: "The literary art has the biggest potential for greatness among the arts, simply because language is its material and because the form of language is closest to being our form of life. (One talks as he makes love, for example; he does not sculpt or paint.)" The Dean's December fits this model of the possibility of the greatness of literature exactly, and not only because of its virtuosity with language. We could research the entire history of human storytelling—however many thousands of years and stories that would involve—and not find another tale that attempts to examine quite so many huge themes.

Albert Corde is the dean of an unnamed Chicago college. A professor of journalism, he is really not an academic but a hardened newspaperman. His wife Minna is a world famous astronomer who defected to the West from the Soviet bloc twenty years before. ('Remember those days, when a political refugee would slide into an American embassy somewhere and request asylum?) Her mother lays on her deathbed in a hospital in Bucharest ("She was hooked in now to the respirator, scanner, monitor...Her face was crisscrossed every which way with tapes, like the Union Jack.") With the grudging cooperation of both the American government and the Communist government, the couple has been let inside the totalitarian regime so Minna can be with her mother during her final hours.

Meanwhile, back home, Corde has left behind a social inferno largely of his own making. A white student has been killed on campus, and two blacks are going to trial for the murder. Corde's nephew, Mason, is instrumental in inciting hostility—both on campus and in the black community—charging that the college, and thus Corde, are racist. Immediately following the killing, there are no witnesses, but when Corde puts up reward money, several suddenly appear out of the woodwork—"Witnesses bought and paid for," Mason sneers. And Corde's cousin, Max, is the defense attorney for the accused. As if all this weren't enough, Corde has just published two long, blistering articles about Chicago, in Harper's, that have managed to offend just about every group in the city.

The ensorcelling phylum of characters inhabiting these pages not only advances the plot and polishes the texture; it also serves to represent the great panorama of humanity, the universal stage; and, finally, it functions as a means to invite the reader to philosophize for herself and to consider the philosophies being offered. Some of these characters float in and out for only a few pages, others much more; but all contribute.

The American Ambassador to Rumania unexpectedly sends a car for Corde, a giant Lincoln Continental with an American flag on the door, something which, in Bucharest, might as well be a spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He, the Ambassador, may well be the only black person in the entire country. Over drinks, he tells Corde that he used to regularly read his pieces in the International Herald Tribune. The Ambassador gets nowhere, however, with the terrifying KGB Colonel who runs the hospital, when Corde asks that his wife be granted more visiting time with her dying mother.

The most tenderly explored relationship in the book is the one between Corde and his dying mother-in-law. During the endless hours he must spend waiting in her apartment, with absolutely nothing to do, he finds copies of Harper's with his articles. She's studied them to death, underlining and writing notes in the margins. Why? In the hospital, Corde tells her, "I love you." Barely conscious, she suddenly begins to writhe and thrash on the bed. The machines and monitors she's hooked up to go beserk; doctors rush in to whisk him away.

In Chicago, the African American head of County Jail, Rufus Ridpath, has gone on trial, accused of cruelty to prisoners. He was featured prominently in the dean's articles. When Corde interviews his defense lawyer for the articles, he all but tells him that Ridpath was set up by political bigwigs downtown due to his zealousness in running the jail. Mason, the nephew, harbors nothing but contempt for his uncle: "For those people, the stakes were life and death. What did Uncle Albert stake? Let him stick to his fancy higher education—seminars in Plato and the Good. Those people of the underclass—dopers or muggers or whores—what were they? Mice?"

Regarding urban blight: a geochemist named Beech has some major theories, and when, by chance, he reads Corde's pieces, he approaches the author about the possibility of collaborating on an article—a Major Statement, a Thesis of Grand Proportions, hard science with an eye towards social good. Witness:

Corde wrestles with Beech's strictly materialist view of the world for a good deal of the novel; in the end, his decision to write or not write the paper with Beech hinges on a few unforseen circumstances.

Some involve a man named Dewey Spangler, a person of elephantine influence in the shaping of public opinion. Spangler is a journalist who interviews the Nixons, the Kissingers, the Brezhnevs of the world, and he and Corde were friends as boys in Chicago. They meet twice in the dining room of the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest—just by chance, they are in town at the same time—and Spangler, by novel's end, will try to put to rest some old demons that have dwelled between the two for forty years. The relationship of the two men is very complicated, very mawkish, involving the contumacious traits of each. Spangler forces Corde's hand very deliberately, in the end, and it isn't really clear if this is out of malice and revenge or out of love and caring (a case, it seems to me, may be made for either).

Obviously, Chicago is a familiar Bellovian setting, and we're not surprised to find Bellow at the top of his game in the scenes he places there. The look, feel and mood of the bleak physical and psychological landscapes of Communist Rumania, however, may be new territory for both novelist and reader, and, therefore, present a challenge. The social conditions of the moment are captured in this passage "In the dining room, there was a huge short wave radio which looked as if it could reach Java but gave only jamming squeals. The big TV with its wooden cowl was equally useless. On it, you saw nobody but the dictator. He inspected, reviewed, greeted, presided; and there were fanfares, flowers, and limousines. People were shown applauding. But if emigration were permitted, the country would be empty within a month." The toilets don't flush, you have to pour water from a bucket. A tangerine or a bunch of grapes are black market delicacies. "December brown" comes at three in the afternoon.

Three Rumanian women stand at the psychological center of the novel: Corde's wife Minna, her dying mother Valeria, and Valeria's sister Gigi. Thirty years prior, Valeria had been the country's Minister of Health (had in fact founded the very hospital in which she now lies dying) but was expelled in disgrace, thrown out of the party. Gigi's gone to pieces, having depended on her sister for guidance in everything in this world. Minna, who depends on Corde for "sublunary matters", is not worldly at all, is wholly consumed with her scientific endeavors; unlike her husband, she cares not a wit for social issues like crime, slums, and prisons. She is at a complete loss to navigate the human complexities of the Communist red tape that controls the fate of her mother (and one of the striking points that Bellow gets across here is that Corde, who is networked to his eyeballs, doesn't get anything substantive done in this regard either, though, in Chicago, his contacts and connections produce quite different results).

In the final sequences, after all accounts in both Chicago and Bucharest are settled, Minna has a breakdown once they return to the States. The stress of it all has simply been too much. Yet, she has an appointment for research time at the great telescope in Mount Palomar, California—something, apparently, very hard to get. If she misses this chance, another won't come for a long time. In spite of her husband's objections, she decides to go. This is where the novel ends, in the stars—as Minna descends into the control room of the telescope, hooked up with all kinds of scientific gauges and machinery and Corde contemplates the heavens—so clear, so vivid, so real at the top of the telescope, at the top of the mountains, and feels a deep sense of community with the universe, something he can't explain but feels. The implication is that the pure scientist, the astronomer, may be able to achieve an avenue of knowledge that is beyond that which can be achieved by the journalist, the dean.

In The Dean's December, we see one man grapple with race relations; with the Cold War ideologies that competed so tensely; with purported scientific explanations of human behavior; with complex issues of family and friendship; with the decay of the American city and the establishment of a permanent underclass; with the incredibly frustrated lives of people who once lived in freedom but came under the rule of the Communists; with the diplomatic protocol and dealings which exist at the highest levels of government; with questions of love and marriage; with the ties that bind people together across decades, across oceans, across entire lives; and with the beauty of the purely intellectual pursuits of science. This is a magnificent novel with rich, true-to-life characters, a plot that is not too complex yet not too simple, with vividly described places and events, and with a willingness to take up big philosophical issues. It repays the reader's investment in it, over and over again.