The Adventures of Augie March (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) | Saul Bellow

The Adventures of Augie March (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) | Saul Bellow | Simply Epic

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	The Adventures of Augie March (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) Saul Bellow Penguin Classics, 1996 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 65 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Great American Novel

For a while I was intrigued by the description of "The Adventures of Augie March" as a "great American novel" because all the time that Augie spends in Chicago (and a couple suburbs) could have come from Dickens, transplanting Depression-era Chicago for Victorian London and Mrs. Renling for Miss Haversham, and so forth. When I thought about it deeper and looked more closely I decided what gave this "great American novel" status is not the story itself but the underlying sense of optimism as Augie never loses hope even after the love of his life leaves him and his Merchant Marine freighter gets torpedoed. It's that same spirit that sent explorers to these shores and propelled pioneers ever westward in search of Manifest Destiny.

For the obligatory plot summary, this is the story of Augie March. He grows up with his feeble-spirited mother and focused brother Simon under the control of "Grandma" Lauch, who is not their real grandma but an imperial Russian immigrant. As he gets out into the workforce (this being the Roaring Twenties he does so at a very young age) Augie works a variety of legal and illegal jobs for people like the paraplegic real estate guru Einhorn, the fussy Mrs. Renling, and his brother among others. He joins an attempt to smuggle in Canadian immigrants, steals and resells books to fund his education, and makes some shady dealings for a shady New York lawyer in post-WWII Europe. Along the way, Augie is always in search of the meaning of life. He thinks he finds it after following the beautiful Thea to Mexico to train an eagle to hunt lizards, then again after she breaks his heart and he marries the aspiring actress Stella. But in the end it's the journey that's more important than finding any concrete answer.

As far as criticisms go the sentences are often long and wordy and overloaded with obscure references to ancient history and religion and literature. Some of the characters like the Einhorns and Renlings and his in-laws the Magnuses seem largely repetitious. It's also a little too convenient that whenever Augie seems to be in a jam some old acquaintance pops up to give him a job or some advice.

But I'm willing to look past that and embrace the spirit of the story, the optimism of a man searching for meaning among meaninglessness. Compared to that, other concerns are really just a trifle.

BTW, if you're a fan of Dickens or contemporaries like John Irving then this is right up your alley. It is truly a classic.

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Simply Epic

I completely understand why many people commented that they could not get into the book. It took me four go's before I got into it enough to finish it, but once I pushed past the first 30 pages or so, you start to see the brilliance of the novel and the brilliance of Saul Bellow. This novel may very well be the last "epic" and truly expansive novel to have been written, quite frankly, because it's so difficult to juggle social commentary and heady ideas in an interesting package. I'm certain any review of mine would fail to do the book justice, but one way to look at it is an "On the Road" with textual meat to it, in that Bellow heaps on the observation and the commentary where Kerouac leaves it alone. Augie is a traveller who tries to find his own way in the world, only to ultimately reach a somewhat stagnant, but fulfilling place in the world. The novel has everything you would need for pleasure in that enough action takes place to satiate you, but it also speaks to you on a deeper, almost spiritual level as it asks you to look at the world and your place and question whether your actions and their results were ever really in your control. Kudos to Bellow for a solid and memorable work, one that belongs in the American canon.

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Inchoate Bellow tries to flex his genius (with mixed results)

Augie March is a modern Coloumbus discovering America. Bellows, master of the complicated single character narrative, paints Augie's childhood strongly illuminating his relationship to money. Augie was born poor. This is contrasted with Grandma Lauch's desire to have Augie and his brother Simon become gentlemen. She strives to teach them manners without the world to match the image materially. She eventually gets thrown away into a old age home where they rarely visit. Characters are disposed of, like Augie's mother, who goes to a home for the blind and his other brother George, a mental handicapped boy. George eventually marries rich and then disposes of Augie all together after Augie is no longer a viable product for marriage to one of his wife's daughters. Augie trades on his cowtowing and good looks to break into wealth circles, but this is far from a novel of manners. Augie's grit reflects that of all social classes, that of all of America. Simon goes as far as to boorishly tear his new mother-in-laws clothes off at the dinner table in a joke as to how poorly she dressed. Augie paints himself as a victim to everyone else's plans, they are never his own. A friend gets pregnant and comes to Augie to help with an abortion. Another suggests that he start stealing books. When he begins stealing quarters as a child from his job, it was again someone else's idea. It is only when he decides to get surgery to allow him to join the military does he start to live for himself. But ultimately he is tied up by an insane crewmate whose life he saved, again plays victim to luck and chance. It reminded me of the Stephen Crane story "The Open Boat" with all its naturalistic undertones. If this victimization and materialism has a sort of counterpoint it may be suggested that it comes in love. However, emotion falls behind the ability of a man to take care of a woman financially, or provide her with copious excitement. The "connections" that form fall away. Like many (all of the Bellows books I have read) the main character is a free wielding one man army of insatiable cravings ("I want I want," says Henderson). I found myself less interested in Augie than Henderson or Herzog. Bellows vignette style, along with providing multifarious facts about a character falls short at times for its failure to outline Augie's motives. I can follow what he does, and be interested in what he does, but without a impetus I can understand why some people mentioned they had a hard time finishing this book. I did not, however. I love Bellow's philosophical styling's and would have liked to see a stronger singular perspective been developed for Augie. This is a bildungsroman that never matures. Perhaps another viewpoint would be to read this in a post-modern light where ennui and nihilism and Marxism coalesce for the character that is going everywhere and nowhere at once. However I believe this has been said better (Gravity's Rainbow) and more simply (On the Road). And if Bellows later works are any indication he seems to be more of a modernist writer. This is a great artist who has not found a solid enough footing to produce the cohesive novels of his later years. Any part of the book, isolated, is a great read.

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Great big YES to America

The Adventures of Augie March is Bellow's most exuberant, most optimistic book. A memoir from the point of a man about to enter middle-age, it sums up his great American youth - from a boy in Chicago, bought up by the redoubtable Grandma Lausch, to an adolescence and early adulthood filled with drift and uncertainty. Augie March is a dreamer, an idealist, a man who America offers no fixed place or route for but he keeps knocking and banging the door down anyway. He takes on a multitude of jobs: thief, scholar, union organizer, navy man, experiences love, poverty and war, and encounters a whole babble of people: the elderly Einhorn, an early employer, 'one of the most remarkable people I have ever met', the charismatic Thea with whom he falls in love and trails to Mexico on a harebrained scheme to train eagles, a mad scientist on a boat off the coast of Africa. And many more. A cast of hundreds.

The pages of the novel are crammed with sights, sensations, philosophies, ideas, word pictures depicting a whole range of Depression era American life. It is a period of great contrasts and huge innocence (nowadays, what American child is free to roam freestyle around the cities like Augie?). Augie wants to find a way to live a life when the whole heave of the world is towards pinning down, surpression, barriers and, ultimately death. This, especially so, for Americans born of poor immigrant stock like Augie. However, despite all this, he refuses to buckle, and compares himself at the end to a modern day Columbus of the near at hand. He may not have excelled in life, may not have been the genuis his grandma wanted him to be, or the wealthy capitalist paragon his brother Simon tried to mould him into, but boy has he lived.

Exuberant though this is, it is the very bubbling, picaresque charm of the novel that limits its greatness. For once it is clear that Augie is destined to be a great American picaresque character, the book begins to wane and pay for its lack of structure. We know, deep down, that whatever happens to Augie, whatever misfortune befalls him, he will rise with his face out of the mud, a rakish toothless grin on his face. Augie never REALLY seems to suffer. He is like a cork, bobbing on the surface of the water: listless, yes, but he will never go under.

Read Bellow's next book - the much shorter 'Sieze the Day' which is a far more compelling look at the American Dream - what the beast really is, what it can do to people. And then on to the chaotic mid-life crisis book 'Herzog' and the late period summations of modern intellectual American existance. Those are Bellow's truly great works. Augie March is a youthful exuberance, but not the heights of literature he would later scale.

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