Yeah, it's a terrific book, but among Bellow's first three novels, I believe it is the least of them. Read it anyway, get what is to be gotten, then move on, keep it in your mind, allow Augie to haunt you for a while, then forget all about that person who bothered you like hell but just couldn't stop trying to help--
Augie's "adventures" consist mainly of his getting entangled in various affairs of his relatives, friends, girlfriends, and employers. These episodes range dramatically from his nearly getting caught by the police in a stolen car, to his accompaniment of his friend Mimi to an abortionist and her subsequent grave illness (probably a bold thing to write about at the time), to helping his girlfriend Thea train an eagle to hunt lizards in Mexico. (Thea finds, to her frustration, that she can train neither the eagle nor Augie.) This is a bizarre assortment of events, but the depiction of each is strangely realistic and unique.
The narration is masterfully constructed with Bellow's erudite prose and penchant for rich description. Reading this novel is challenging but ultimately rewarding.
Predating Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" by nearly a decade, "The Adventures of Augie March" tells the story of a young man from an impoverished Chicago neighborhood who rejects conventional expectations that he make the best of all good situations that, in other lives, would have led to riches and satisfaction. While his brother Simon goes out to find the quickest way to taste the cream of the business world, only to discover that it isn't at all the way to the happiness he'd imagined, Augie--a man who never quite makes the break from childhood into manhood but instead continues on the same unbroken line of judging the world through what refractions the lenses of his emotions augur--continually renews himself through a series of piqaresque adventures as he searches for "the axial lines" of his life.
After a miserably unsuccessful flirtation with petty crime (he helps a hoodlum buddy break into a basement), Augie, part of an entire generation of men who really didn't stand a chance at success in the world, at least once the Great Depression descended, journeys through the eccentricities of Chicago, a town that, like Augie, rejected the more conventional ways and means of the East Coast establishment as it came into its own as a great city. Falling under the official and unofficial tuteledges of a variety of oddballs, schnooks and characters, Augie often lucks out, too, meeting beautiful heiresses and slipping into High Society almost without really realizing it. However, regardless of the chance at ensnaring the easy dream, Augie withdraws, to the confoundment of his friends and mentors, only to be reborn again.
Perhaps the most sparkling episode occurs when Augie, enamored by the unconventional activities of his girlfriend, Thea, follows her to Mexico--where she buys an eagle and trains it to hunt huge lizards. How on earth did either of them manage to sleep with that eagle sitting on the dresser of the hotel room? Of course, regardless of the exotic character of this infatuation, the mission fails and Augie returns to Chicago, metaphor and emblem of all the freedom for which Augie yearns.
Each episode is represented by one of several paradigmatic figures; each episode a stage of a hero's journey, a step on darkened glass that cannot help but mirror a phase of every man's life. Poignantly possessing the colorations and expressive details of the hardships, the oddball twists and the distortions of American dreams mutated by the trials of economic depravity, "The Adventures of Augie March," Saul Bellow's earliest great novel, ruminates and vents like the wind across Lake Michigan. Of course, Augie is smarter than he thinks he is. If there is any imperfection at all in the story, it's that Augie is simply too smart to be believed.
