Herzog by Saul Bellow (1964)

He writes letters he will never send. To the dead, to the living, to Nietzsche, to Eisenhower, to his analyst, to God, scrawled on scraps and composed in his head, a brilliant man cracking apart and unable to stop explaining himself. Moses Herzog has lost his wife to his best friend, lost the thread of his life, and the only thing his great learning can do is narrate his own collapse with unbearable wit. Few novels have so exactly caught the particular agony of the over-educated heart, the way intelligence becomes a torment when feeling overwhelms it, the way a mind talks and talks because it cannot bear what has happened to the marriage beneath it. And yet the book is funny, gorgeously, helplessly funny, Bellow's sentences spilling and looping with a vitality no breakdown can kill. To read it is to feel a mind save itself by the sheer act of putting everything into words, and to recognize, with a jolt, how much of your own grief you have tried to think your way out of.