Seize the Day Characters

(a.k.a. Wilhelm "Wilky" Adler)It's hard not to feel bad for Tommy Wilhelm, even if he has brought most of his troubles on himself. At heart, the man is an idealist, a romantic, and a dreamer, and h...

Just who is this Dr. Tamkin, really? Is he a medical doctor? A psychiatrist? A psychologist? A scam artist who bought his credentials from a shady degree mill? An accomplished businessman? A philos...

Imagine Ebenezer Scrooge had a hopeless son who kept messing up his life and making terrible decisions. Or, better yet, imagine Scrooge McDuck having to watch over and over as his hapless nephew Do...

Catherine Adler is Wilhelm's younger sister. She's forty years old and married to a court reporter who seems to always be down on his luck, kind of like Wilhelm. What is it with this family? Like W...

Margaret Wilhelm is Tommy Wilhelm's wife. Although the two have been separated for four years, they aren't legally divorced. As the novel's narrator tells us, Margaret "would regularly agree to div...

As the novel's narrator tells us, the Manager of the Brokerage Office is "a cold, mild, lean German who dressed correctly and around his neck wore a pair of opera glasses with which he read the boa...

Maurice Venice is the talent scout who first makes Wilhelm Adler hope that he'll be a big-time star. When Wilhelm meets Venice, he thinks of him as being "huge and oxlike, so stout that his arms se...

Olive is Wilhelm's mistress: the young Catholic girl from Roxbury whom he would have married if his wife, Margaret, had given him a divorce. We never learn much about Olive, but the few memories th...

Mr. Perls is a friend and neighbor of Dr. Adler; he lives on the fifteenth floor of the Hotel Gloriana. When Wilhelm first meets him, he sees that he "carried a heavy cane with a crutch tip," and h...

What's with all the old folks in this story? Mr. Rappaport is "nearly blind" and "very old, older even than Dr. Adler, and if you believed Tamkin he had once been the Rockefeller of the chicken bus...

Saul Bellow has a rare talent for capturing the "human essence" of even the most minor characters who appear in his novels. Rubin is a great case in point. All we know about him is that he manages...

Tommy and Paul are Wilhelm and Margaret's sons. At fourteen years old, Tommy is the eldest, and Paul is nine. The boys aren't active characters in the novel, and most of what we know about them com...