The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics) | Saul Bellow

The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics) | Saul Bellow | This is Not Carl Sandburg's Chicago

books:

The Adventures of ...

	The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics) Saul Bellow Penguin Classics, 2006 - 608 pages average customer review:based on 59 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

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.

Excellent writing

What can I say other than this novel is a true 20th Century American classic. The use of language is incomparable.

for more information click here

This is Not Carl Sandburg's Chicago

These seem to be Chicago days for this reviewer. He has just done some reviews of Chicago's Chess Records that essentially defined the sound of the electrified blues in what would be old Augie's old neighborhood. Furthermore, I have reviewed the work of Chicago's Nelson Algren who takes more than one look at the downside of Chicago life in the raw - what happens to the Augies when they do not break out of that place between the working poor and the lumpenproletariat. And this is a good place to set up the fundamental difference in Bellow's take on life as compared to Algrens's. Both describe lives and milieus that can expose the nasty, short and brutish side of life but unlike Algren's Frankie Machine in The Man With the Golden Arm Augie is smart (and clean enough) to make the break.

To that extent Bellow's Augie, his pals and his town are a celebration of the possibilities that the immigrants to this country believed was possible (and on too many occasions were dashed to pieces). A nice little devise that Bellow uses to highlight this contrast is the tension between the career paths of Augie and his brother. Both face the existential crisis of being left to one's own devices in the world but the brother survives by creating wealth for himself and forgets, in fact scorns, the idea of intellectual reflections about man's fate. Poor Augie though wants to know the meaning of life once he has finally broken out of the working class milieu- but travel, a rich lady friend and a whole different set of adventures do not satisfy that hunger to know that meaning.

I would argue, and here I go back to Augie's days as a Trotskyist, that he might have cut against the grain of that modern day sense of self-isolation in a heartless world if he had organized others to create an alternative society where that alienation from productive labor could have been diminished. But, that is just this reviewer pontificating against Bellow's facile early literary Trotskyism. Although I read this book initially about 25 years ago the first half still is gripping. The second half meanders a little more than I recall from the first reading. This is an early work though. Bellow gets better as a writer later, if not in resolving the humankind's existential crisis.

for more information click here

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.

for more information click here

Growing up in the depression

I read Augie more than 20 years ago and again in 07 and still found it an enjoyable read, engrossing, entertaining, gives one an idea of what life was like back then during the depression. It's really a sprawling succession of stories, not particularly cohesive but what life story is? It's the experiences that matter here. Bellow's themes about family are here as are his usual excessive references to just about every intellectual pursuit known to humanity. If he leaves anything out he'll be sure to mention it in the next book and every successive book and most of the time you have no idea who or what he's talking about but often that's ok, you get the jist of the matter. Naturally there are more than a few dazzling females for the protagonist to blunder with, succumb to, seduce and love. It is not a masterpiece but rather the burgeoning work of a very talented and marvelous young writer as he begins the ascent before he reaches the peak.

for more information click here

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.

for more information click here