The Dean's December by Saul Bellow
Published 1982 · 320 pages · 114,711 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Political Fiction
How hard is The Dean's December to read?
The Dean's December scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Bellow draws on a broad literary and philosophical vocabulary — "propitiatory," "hypervividness," "cosmopolitan psychologism," "de minimis" — without the specialized scientific jargon of Pynchon or the archaic coinage of Joyce. Foreign phrases appear (Romanian, French) and allusions to Structuralism, R.D. Laing, and Matthew Arnold expect cultural literacy. The vocabulary is demanding but context usually clarifies meaning.
- Sentence structure: 74 out of 100
- Bellow constructs long, winding sentences loaded with parenthetical asides and stacked subordinate clauses: "as he — while pitying his wife; while hating the Colonel; while figuring why the Colonel had made such a decision — still followed thought themes of his own." This hypotactic style is more sustained than The Great Gatsby but less extreme than Proust's 78 or Faulkner's 85; readers encounter genuinely complex grammatical demands across every page.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- Much of the novel consists of direct philosophical meditation: on the "worldwide process of consolidation" reducing personal humanity, on liberal democracy versus Soviet nihilism, on what Chicago's urban anarchy "means philosophically." Corde uses the hospital bureaucracy and the courtroom scenes as springboards for extended theoretical inquiry. The abstraction is more persistent than in 2666 (65) and approaches the philosophical weight of Brothers Karamazov (75).
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- The novel packs allusions to Romanian history, Cold War politics, Chicago racial sociology, Benjamin Franklin, R.D. Laing, and Structuralism into a single consciousness over three weeks. Embedded journalism fragments, medical details, and political analysis compete with the grief narrative. This is denser than Lolita (65) but significantly less maximalist than War and Peace (80) — it remains a single-viewpoint novel without multiple plotlines.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- The novel filters entirely through Corde's subjective consciousness, requiring readers to infer the attitudes of secondary characters and to reconstruct the Chicago backstory from his memory. However, Bellow is often discursive and articulate — Corde partially explains his own symbols and frequently tells us what he means. The indirection falls above The Great Gatsby (65) but well below Pedro Paramo (85), where reality itself is uncertain.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Recurring motifs operate symbolically — the cyclamens as unconscious perfection, Bucharest's brown December light as moral atmosphere, the contrasting cities embodying parallel forms of decay. But Bellow tends to partially articulate his symbols through Corde's reflective commentary rather than leaving them to work silently. The symbolic load is more integrated than Heart of Darkness (65) but less sustained than To the Lighthouse (82).
- Ironic distance: 42 out of 100
- Bellow writes with largely earnest sympathy for Corde's predicament. Mild self-critique appears — Corde acknowledges his articles may be "guilty of poetry," and his friend Spangler accuses him of "abyssifying" — but the authorial voice and Corde's voice are very close throughout. This is not the radical ironic machinery of Pale Fire (78) or Lolita (75); the gap between what is said and what is meant is modest.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- The novel ends with a quietly transcendent image — Corde and Minna at the Palomar telescope — that provides emotional resolution for the grief narrative while leaving the Chicago social questions entirely open. Mason's fate, the provost conflict, and whether the articles accomplished anything are unresolved. The ambiguity is more deliberate than The Great Gatsby (60) but less total than Crying of Lot 49 (75).
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- The novel alternates between Bucharest present and Chicago past through Corde's associative memory, with embedded journalism fragments adding a third layer. Roman numeral chapter titles mark the sections. This is more complex than War and Peace (40) — which is chronological despite epic scope — but far less experimental than Infinite Jest (85) or Pedro Paramo (80). A careful reader can track the chronology without difficulty.
How The Dean's December is regarded
The Dean's December holds a literary regard score of 69 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.