two bullets in it, forming a vague plan to kill Madeleine and Valentine and run off with Junie. The plan goes awry when he sees Valentine giving Junie a bath and realizes that she is in no danger. The next day, after taking his daughter to the aquarium, Herzog crashes his car and is charged with possession of a loaded weapon. His brother, the rational Will, picks him up to try and help get him back on his feet. Herzog heads to Ludeyville, where his brother meets him and tries to convince him to check himself into an institution, which Herzog has considered but ultimately decides against. To Will's surprise, Ramona joins them for dinner and Herzog begins making plans to fix up the house, which, like his life, needs repair but is still structurally sound. Herzog closes by saying that he doesn't need to write any more letters. In flashbacks throughout the novel, other critical details of Herzog's life come to light, including his first marriage to Daisy, their son, Marco, the life of Herzog's father, and Herzog's sexual molestation by a stranger on a street in Chicago. Style "People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas", Bellow once wrote. "We live among ideas much more than we live in nature." Herzog is such a person. In fact, he considers his addiction to ideas to be his greatest virtue. Herzog's ideas, as expressed in his letters, are brilliant and seductive; "After Herzog", the New York Times book reviewer exulted, "no writer need pretend in his fiction that his education stopped in the eighth grade." But, said Bellow in an interview, Herzog "comes to realize at last that what he considers his intellectual 'privilege' has proved to be another form of bondage." It is only when he has loosened this bondage and gotten in touch with the "primordial person" who exists outside this ideology that Herzog can "achieve the experience of authentic being." The story is told entirely from Herzog's point of view, alternating between first-person and third person. Of the hero's pervasive consciousness, Irving Howe wrote: "We are made captive in the world of Herzog... the consciousness of the character forms the enclosing medium of the novel." In typical Bellow style, the descriptions of characters' emotions and physical features are rich in wit and energy. Herzog's relationships are the central theme of the novel, not