Seize the Day (1956) is a sober and deliberate retreat from the exuberance of The Adventures of Augie March. It has all the surface appearance of a "victim novel" and only some of its pessimistic conclusions. Some reviewers, called Tommy Wilhelm pathetic, while others called him heroic. Some were dismayed with book's tight organization and modern aesthetic. Others praised it for its concentration, intensity, and focused crescendo. Years later, Bellow told interviewer an interviewer that he was appalled at the philosophical immaturity of Augie March and wrote Seize the Day in an attempt to transcend its effusive and emotional limitations. It was possibly written at the same time as the first two "alienation" novels, though Bellow has never more than hinted at this. It is possible to read the novel as thematically counterpointing death and despair with psychic renewal and spiritual survival. The world of this novel is an urban wasteland replete with the sepulchural Hotel Gloriana. Out of work as a salesman, and estranged from his wife and children, Tommy Wilhelm finds himself nearly penniless in early middle-age. As a young man he rejected his father's profession, medicene, tried out for a career in Hollywood, like the classic schlemiehl, been tricked by a phony talent scout, ended up in sales and lost his district due to his boss's nepotism. Hence, he finds himself in the dreadful Hotel Glorianna, amidst the aging capitalist fathers of a previous era, having failed fulfill their notions of masculine achievement. It is a story about the failure of the American dream for a certain type of American male, and about the alternate values of love, feeling, compassion, and non-competition demonstrated by Tommy, who in the dog-eat-dog world of these men is conned not only out of his remaining cash, but almost out of humanistic hope as well. Yet, despite Tommy's experience of victimage, mass society, absurdism, and modernist metaphysics, Bellow is clearly shaping a fiction of hope. His devilish morality play figure, Dr. Tamkin, who spouts absurdist philosophy, mangled Freudianism, alienation ethics, and nihilism to Tommy is presented as a charlatan and a physical grotesque. While Tommy longs for accessible, sensible truths, Tamkin assures him there are only crooked lines. When Tommy asks him where he gets his ideas from, Tamkin becomes the butt of one of Bellow's funniest jokes: "I read the best of literature, science, and philosophy," he says. In his carpe diem sermon, in which Tamkin tells Tommy to take no thought for tomorrow because the past has no value and the future is an impending nightmare, we realize just how profound a critique of modern pessimism Bellow is offering us. In spite of his wife's, his employer's, his father's, and Tamkin's betrayal of him, Tommy is determined to "recover the good, things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. . . ." Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again." His final emotional climax is not bitterness at betrayal, but the achievement of love for all the lurid, imperfect people like himself whom he discovers in the underground subway in Chicago and in the funeral parlor. It is also the novel in which the seeming-orphanage of Joseph, Asa, and Augie, develops into an in-depth treatment of the failure of a father-son relationship. Dr. Adler, the highly successful, but narcissistic old surgeon, spurns his son's emotional pleas for nurturance and financial help. Embarrassed by Tommy's repeated failures, he brags to his friends in the retirement home of his son's financial prowess. Adler refuses to validate any other form of masculine achievement other than financial. Into his character Bellow invests hostility and moral reproach. Though Tommy has failed at marriage, fatherhood, money, and status, Bellow has given him all the right instincts for spiritual survival and social contract as he identifies with the countless unknown others with whom he shares the human plight. It is knowledge, Bellow insists, that resides within the sufficiently humanized soul, and requires no elaborate acquaintance with either philosophy or the world of crass commerce. In this book, Bellow begins in earnest his life-long protest against destructive, American capitalist codes of masculinity which eclipse the contemplative and the poet whose truer achievements will be sensibility and filiation.