In 1989, critics and reviewers were amazed to hear of the unprecedented publication of two Bellow novellas in Penguin paperback first editions. A Theft appeared first, and critics seemed at a loss to place it in the canon. Some commentators were mildly interested, and others seemed singularly unmoved by it. They praised the book for its language, neatness, and control, while complaining of the lack of any genuine large-scale significance. Feminist critics chastised it for its failure to portray a non-sexist portrait of a woman. The text enacts the latest permutation in Bellow's comic opera on the dynamics of the heterosexual human pair. It is the story of a woman raised on old time mid-western religious values and plunged into the world of contemporary marriage and business. Four times divorced and still in love with a man she now knows she cannot have, Clara is still convinced of the necessitity if not viability of the heterosexual human pair in a world which looks like "gogmagogsville to her. Not surprisingly, its situations parallel those of earlier novels as Clara and Ithiel, her long time lover, alternately embrace and flee, seek higher consciousness, and become mired in temporal mundanities. Bellow's demythologization of romantic love in "Gogmagogsville" once again hinges on the ironic portrayal of a male protagonist who can never resolve the dichotomy between desire for ultimate union with the female and the pursuit of the rational. Then there is the continuing Bellow conversation about the failure of marriage, the failure of divorce, and the failure of heterosexual relations generally. Also familiar is the appearance of a protagonist, albeit a female one, who idealizes ultimate union with the exotic, all-powerful member of the opposite sex. Clara just happens to be the female quester who falls for the mythicized all-powerful male, Ithiel Regler, who, as the object of her romantic ideology, cannot bear the weight of her expectations. Smaller in scale, more muted in tone, and done in reversed gender, A Theft deals with some very old Bellow themes: the Hawthornian theft of the human heart, the lure of the intellect, the classic evasions of the male lover, the social chaos of Gogmagogsville, the seeming impossibility of higher synthesis, the human comedy of sexual desire, the failure of psychiatry, boredom, power politics, the chaotic proliferation of ethnic others, the increasing absence of civilized spaces, and the diminished status of the individual. Despite Bellow's enthusiastic endorsement of Clara, her romantic faith and readiness for heterosexual relations have failed to convince most readers thus far. Clara's female development and achievements are not clear enough. Her life is too fogged over by Ithiel for too long, the achievement of an authentic sense of self too slenderly and unconvincingly bestowed, the issue of the theft too ephemeral and too embedded in irony to generate much mythic or metaphorical power. The depiction of lower consciousness in this novel is lacking in typical Bellovian wit and comedy and much too scattered to really succeed.