The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)
by Saul Bellow
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Book Summary Information
Author: Saul BellowEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-03
ISBN: 0143039571
Number of pages: 608
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Reviews of The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: Saul Bellow nearly out-Whitman's Walt Whitman
Summary: 5 Stars
For most of this novel - supposedly, the first of Saul Bellow's great novels (it won him the National Book Award in 1954) - the title for this review that kept suggesting itself to me was "The Prince of Prolixity". Because Bellow, through his first-person narrator Augie March, just goes on and on, and on and on. The page cannot contain the prose -- it overflows and spills onto the reader's lap, then the floor, and under the door -- and the novel seems endless.
The novel consists of Augie March's life story, his "campaign after a worth-while fate". The picaresque story begins in Chicago and most of it takes place in Chicago. Augie's father has disappeared, his mother is blind, his younger brother is retarded, and the family just manages to scrape by, with the occasional assistance of Welfare. When the Depression comes, matters get worse. Augie's older brother, Simon, devotes himself to Mammon. But Augie cannot bring himself to follow his brother's path. He has a seeming myriad of jobs - including delivering newspapers, working in a poolroom, gofer for a crippled businessman, selling shoes and then sporting goods and then rubberized paint, working for his brother in a coalyard, union organizer, kept companion for a wealthy woman, and purser in the merchant marine. By the end of the novel World War II is over and Augie is in Paris. But it is an open-ended story; Augie's "earthly pilgrimage" will continue to unfold.
In the first half of the novel, Augie seems preoccupied primarily with money; in the second half, with love. But, in actuality, what he really is wrestling with throughout is life, and his role in life -- "whether I was all I might be". In conventional literary analysis, THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH might be categorized as a "quest for identity". But I am reluctant to pigeonhole the novel, because it is so individuated -- perhaps a term with a double meaning, since, if I understand Jungian psychology properly (a BIG "if"), the novel could be said to chronicle the "individuation" of Augie March.
And, ultimately, what makes the novel special is its energy, its ebullience, its very prolixity. In telling Augie's story, Saul Bellow nearly out-Whitman's Walt Whitman in "Song of Myself". The novel sprawls, it rambles, it strews about classical and cultural and historical allusions like chickenfeed, it strains syntax, and it sandwiches profound thoughts and sparkling gems of prose amongst sentences that are baffling, or nonsensical, or maybe even silly. The writing often is exasperating, but, oddly, in the end I found it exhilarating. The reading experience was somewhat akin to what I remember about reading Melville's "Moby Dick" or Joyce's "Ulysses" (not to suggest that AUGIE MARCH is quite their equal).
Just one example of Bellow's style, a passage in which Augie describes how it was that he got hooked on reading, especially the reading of history:
"So suppose I wasn't created to read a great declaration, or to boss a palatinate, or send off a message to Avignon, and so on, I could SEE, so there nevertheless was a share for me in all that had happened. How much of a share? Why, I knew there were things that would never, because they could never, come of my reading. But this knowledge was not so different from the remote but ever-present death that sits in the corner of the loving bedroom; though it doesn't budge from the corner, you wouldn't stop your loving. Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read."
In its wordy way, that's a pretty good explanation for why I read. And, although it took me three months to make my way from beginning to end, I am glad that I finally got around to reading THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH.
Summary of The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)
As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this gem by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Bold, expansive, and keenly humorous, The Adventures of Augie March blends street language with literary elegance to tell the story of a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. A "born recruit," Augie makes himself available for hire by plungers, schemers, risk takers, and operators, compiling a record of choices that is-to say the least- eccentric.
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