Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Seize the Day’ by Saul Bellow

From Close Readings by London Review of Books

July 20, 2026 · 17 min · Season 17 · Episode 8

About this episode

James Wood discusses Saul Bellow's 'Seize the Day' and its connections to realism and modernism.

‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise details, the free indirect style and the use of leitmotif all reveal Bellow as a keen student of Flaubert and the 19th-century realists. Yet his novella about a disastrous day in the life of the sloppy, jobless 44-year-old Tommy Wilhelm also bears the intervening influence of modernism, not least in its opening section in which, for twenty pages, our hero simply stands on the street thinking about his life. In this episode, James Wood discusses the Bellovian prose style with its Melvillian love of words and biblical undertones, and explores the book’s evocation of a postwar Manhattan imbued with masculinist conventionality. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Saul Bellow talks to Melvyn Bragg…

People in this episode

Host: James Wood

Topics covered

realism
modernism
literary analysis
Saul Bellow
postwar Manhattan
free indirect style

Keywords

Saul Bellow
Seize the Day
realism
modernism
literary style
postwar literature
Flaubert
Madame Bovary

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Seize the Day, Madame Bovary

Places: Manhattan