The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

"I wanted him to give me wisdom," Augie says of a venerable businessman, and says, essentially, throughout his reminiscences. Augie March recalls his impoverished childhood in a Jewish neighborhood in the in the 1920s, continuing the narrative into his adolescence and through to his adulthood in post-WWII Europe. He describes his jobs, his friends, his romantic forays, and his travels- from Chicago, to Mexico, to New York, and finally abroad. His exploits are, as they have often been described, picaresque. Augie is not always above the law, but when he strays, we go right along with him.

Augie is continually caught up in the whirling eddies of strong personalities. One of his first jobs involves assisting a paralyzed business eccentric whom he reveres as a genuine genius, and later he steals textbooks with a Mexican math whiz on scholarship at the University of Chicago. Augie is perpetually seeking knowledge and, as he said above, wisdom. He begins to read the textbooks before delivering them, and he becomes enraptured with the ideas he finds. “I lay in my room and read, feeding on print and pages like a famished man.”

The book is dauntingly long, for Augie’s life is made of innumerable adventures, no detail of which he considers too small to include. Bellow composed complex sentences of description- clause piled on clause, with illustrative concrete nouns and reclassified verbs stacked precariously atop the subjects and predicates. Augie employs esoteric allusions abundantly, almost obnoxiously, as if Bellow wanted to underscore Augie’s self-education, evidence of his having read widely and deeply without perhaps a tempering authority to guide him in the proper deployment of such potent arsenal.

Augie uses very little foreshadowing, restraining himself to telling the story as it happens, avoiding bracing suspense in favor of a more natural revelation of events. Augie traces the development of his perception of himself as the events are unfolding, coming to a refreshing self-awareness towards the end. “I said when I started to make the record that I would be plain and heed the knocks as they came, and also that a man’s character is his fate. Well, then it is obvious that this fate, or what he settles for, is also his character.” Though his character-as-fate theory is nebulous and indefinite at best, the underlying current of personal responsibility that he espouses is a worthy conclusion.