The Adventures of Augie March

Augie’s Chicago

The novel opens with a sentence that arrived in American literature like a weather change: “I am an American, Chicago born — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” Augie March is the child of a vague, near-blind mother and an absent father, raised in a tenement on the North Side of Chicago during the Depression, surrounded by hustlers, idealists, criminals, and an extended Jewish community trying to survive in a city that offers opportunity at a cost. He is bright enough to be noticed, adaptable enough to take what each new mentor offers, and stubborn enough to refuse the fate each one imagines for him.

The picaresque structure serves Bellow’s purposes perfectly. Augie moves through jobs and loves and schemes with an almost compulsive restlessness: working for a bootlegger, stealing books, training an eagle in Mexico with a wealthy adventuress named Thea, serving in the merchant marine during World War II, eventually washing up in postwar Europe with a wife and no particular plan. Each episode introduces a new cast of characters who represent a different theory of how to live — the strong personality who wants to define Augie — and each time, Augie slips free. He is shaped by everyone and captured by no one.

The parade of would-be definers is one of the novel’s great pleasures: Einhorn the crippled businessman-philosopher, the formidable Grandma Lausch who runs the family in the mother’s absence, Thea with her eagles and her will, Mintouchian the Armenian lawyer who offers a philosophy of pragmatic corruption. They are among the most vivid minor characters in American fiction, drawn with the kind of Dickensian specificity that Bellow consciously invoked.

The New American Prose

What Bellow did with English in Augie March had not been done before. His prose synthesizes registers that had previously been kept separate: the rhythms of Yiddish speech, the grand Whitmanian declaration of continental scope, the social density of Dickens, and the vernacular American energy of the streets. The result is a style that is simultaneously learned and street-smart, lyrical and abrupt, universal in its ambitions and hyperlocally specific in its textures. It is Jewish-American prose at its most exuberant — not the anxious assimilation of earlier Jewish-American writing but a full-throated claim on the whole tradition.

Martin Amis, one of Bellow’s most committed inheritors, described Augie’s voice as transformative: a revelation that literary English could carry this much energy and this much material without losing control of itself. Philip Roth, whose own early novels owe something to Bellow’s example, identified Augie March as the moment American Jewish fiction stopped being a subgenre and became, simply, American fiction. The synthesis was new because Bellow was new: a novelist who had read everything and grown up in immigrant Chicago and refused to choose between these two inheritances.

The prose is not, by later Bellow standards, perfectly controlled. At 608 pages, there are stretches where the energy dissipates and the episodic structure feels more like accumulation than architecture. But the best passages — Augie in Chicago, Augie in Mexico, Augie’s sustained meditation on what it means to be the kind of American who refuses to be made — justify every page around them.

Where to Start with Bellow

The Adventures of Augie March won the National Book Award in 1954, Bellow’s second (he would win it twice more). It was his third novel — after Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), both accomplished but relatively constrained — and represented a deliberate break: Bellow later described the two earlier novels as too tidily constructed, too European in their restraint. He wrote Augie as a liberation. The result announced his ambitions to the American literary world, and those ambitions were fulfilled in the subsequent decade with Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Herzog (1964).

The question of where to start with Bellow has no single answer. Augie March is the most joyful and the most purely readable; Herzog is the most perfectly achieved; Humboldt’s Gift (1975) is the most ambitious and most flawed. Readers coming to Bellow fresh often do best with Herzog — tighter, funnier, more immediately gripping — and then move to Augie for the full Bellovian world-picture. Those who love Augie sometimes find Herzog disappointingly interior by comparison. Both responses are defensible. What is not defensible is reading one and skipping the other: together, they form the two poles of everything Bellow was trying to do.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — The novel that changed American prose: exuberant, picaresque, crammed with life, and built around a voice that was Jewish and universal and unlike anything that had come before it.