The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
Summary
Augie March announces himself in the first sentence, an American, Chicago born, going at things free style, and the novel keeps that promise for six hundred pages: a picaresque that follows a poor Jewish boy from the West Side of Depression Chicago wherever the current takes him, which is nearly everywhere.
Augie's gift and his curse are the same thing: he is endlessly adoptable. His childhood belongs to Grandma Lausch, the boarder who rules the fatherless March household by cunning; his adolescence to Einhorn, the crippled poolroom operator and neighbourhood fixer, one of the great characters in American fiction, who teaches him that intelligence and corruption can share a body comfortably. After that the recruiters never stop: rich families wanting to adopt him, unions, thieves, his brother Simon's cash marriage and cold ambition, and finally Thea, the obsessed heiress who carries him to Mexico to hunt giant lizards with a trained eagle, the novel's most famous episode and its clearest parable, since the eagle, like Augie, declines to be what its handler requires.
War service, a shipwreck, a lifeboat shared with a mad scientist, and an unsettled marriage in Europe carry him out, still uncommitted, still taking notes.
The style was the revolution: long, loaded, exuberant sentences that mixed street talk with philosophy and gave American fiction a new voice to argue with.
Around six hundred pages, episodic on principle.
Best for readers who want the novel as open road, and can love a hero whose refusal to be pinned down is both his freedom and his failure.
Historical Context & Significance
The Adventures of Augie March won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1954, the first of Saul Bellow's three, a record for the fiction prize he still holds, with Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet to follow. It was the book where Bellow, broke out of the tight, Flaubertian manner of his first two novels and let the language rip, and the opening sentence has been quoted as a declaration of independence for American prose ever since.
Time and the Modern Library both placed it among the century's hundred best novels, and later champions have gone further, promoting it as the great American novel outright, the strongest such case resting on exactly what early critics complained of: its shapelessness is the shape of the subject.
Within Bellow's own shelf its reputation has settled just below Herzog's, and the two books mark his poles, appetite in this one, anguish in that. The Nobel followed in 1976, with this novel always cited among the reasons.