Well, I definitely haven't read either Mason & Dixon or Gravity's Rainbow in a number of years, so it might not actually be up there with them, but I did really enjoy Vineland, and the second half is better than the first. The Takeshi and D.L. subplots are probably the least essential in the novel, but if you don't enjoy the People's Republic of Rock n' Roll, then, man, I don't even fucking know.

God, I need to start reading again. I always narrow it down to a few books, but never follow through.

just pick up a book and read it. If you mean to say you're overwhelmed by the amount of potentially good reads out there, I know what you mean. But the only thing to do is pick one.

The Adventures of Augie March-Saul Bellow


“What do you want to do with your life?” That’s the question I hear most often these days. Sometimes it’s phrased a little less directly (‘what are you majoring in?’), but what it’s getting at is the same. It’s also the same question Augie, the main character and narrator in Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March”, is asked of by just about everyone: his brother, his various mentors, his girlfriends. As Simon, Augie’s brothers, puts it to him (p.462):

‘So when are you going to start doing what you’re going to do?’
‘I wish I knew. But it seems to be one of those things you can’t rush.’
‘Well, people don’t trust you if they don’t know what you do, and you can’t blame them.’

The trouble Augie has in answering the question is the same I have. Namely, how do you come up with a concrete answer to such a general question? How do find a verb to replace ‘do’ that can hold its own against the weight of 'life'? It is, as Augie says, certainly not a decision one should rush. For Augie, there is no clear path to the answer. And with no real purpose of his own to direct himself forward, Augie often finds himself under the influence of other bolder characters. ‘Machiavellis’ as he calls them. People whose force of character is so strong that they attract others towards themselves. The first of these Machiavellis is Willie Einhorn, a wheelchair bound cripple and heir to an insurance empire who manages to exert his will through the strength of his mind. He negotiates, exploits, bullies…whatever he needs to do to close the deal. Augie describes him:

Einhorn was the first superior man I knew. He had a brain and many enterprises, real directing power, philosophical capacity, and if I were methodical enough to take thought before an important and practical decision and also if I were really his disciple and not what I am, I’d ask myself ‘What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn think?” I’m not kidding when I enter Einhorn in this eminent list. P.63

So for a while Augie bounces around with Einhorn, doing his dirty work, carrying to old invalid about (in one humorous scene, Augie has to deliver Einhorn to a whore house, carrying him piggyback up the steps), even washing the superior man at times. But, as Augie notes, he doesn’t turn out to be Einhorn’s ‘disciple’. The stock market crashes, Einhorn’s empire crumbles, and Augie finds himself pulled into the orbit of other characters. Augie’s passive, friendly nature makes him an easy target for these recruiting personalities. As one of his girlfriends, Stella, says of him, he is one of those people ‘who other people are always trying to fit into their schemes’ (p.418). And so this provides much of the momentum of the novel: Augie drifts about-unsure on just exactly what he wants to do-until someone snags him up and draws him in on his ‘scheme’. This leads Augie to a close call trying to smuggle immigrants across the border, a brief stint with a millionaire’s daughter, a giant lizard hunt with a trained eagle in Mexico…all sorts of adventures in the grand picaresque tradition of Don Quixote and that other American, Huck Finn.

Augie, of course, meets a girl and falls in love, too (more on that later). But what makes the novel is how these events, interesting in their own right, are then fed through Bellow’s mind-ever thinking, ever philosophizing-which seems to take an event and search from the primordial to the modern for points of reference. You see this from the very beginning, where Augie introduces himself using a reference to ancient Greek philosophy:

I am an American, Chicago born-Chicago, that somber city-and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles

and continues:

Everybody knows there no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.

I love this introduction because it so well captures the ‘freewheeling’ spirit of the novel and Augie himself. Here’s Augie, this low-class Jew (which we learn about in the paragraphs that follow), already making bold proclamations (for a Jew to claim ‘I am an American’ was certainly bold in 1953). We also start to see the first hints of Augie striving for something more. That is, we read on and learn of Augie’s humble beginnings-his simple minded mother, his idiot brother George, the family’s scheme to save money by having Augie lie to obtain a free pair of eye glasses ( we see, too, Augie’s nature to fit into other people schemes already)-but we also see in his language real thought and real knowledge. Why, in the first paragraph he’s already referencing Greek philosophy. And then he goes on to compare the family’s matriarch, Granma Lausch, to Odessa and his mother to a woman of Zeus. What other poor Chicago Jew speaks in this way? Only one who is striving for something beyond his background. Augie doesn’t make clear what exactly it is he’s striving for, (not at first, at least) but the striving is there nonetheless, and the reader can feel it. He goes on to say early in the novel:

“What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn’t to make a nobility of us all? And this universal eligibility to be noble, taught everywhere, was what gave Simon airs of honor.”

Thus, we see that what Augie wants is very much the American dream. He wants to lift himself up to nobility by his own virtues. He wants what is later described as a ‘worthwhile fate’. And in light of this much of Augie’s decisions become clearer as the novel progresses. One prominent complaint I’ve read from various blogs and reviews about Augie March is the inability of Augie to commit to anything. That is, he never sticks with Einhorn, he never carries through with any of the opportunities presented to him, and can’t even keep the first love of his life. As one reviewer put it:

"And the plot. So the "adventures" of the title are just Augie March meeting a lot of people and describing the people and being very very passive about his entire fucking life. Kurt Vonnegut said every character should want something, even if it's a glass of water. I barely, in 600+ pages, got a clear sense of what Augie wanted except occasionally when he wanted one woman or another."

That’s just it though, what Augie wants isn’t even clear to himself. But he wants nonetheless. He wants ‘nobility’, he wants a ‘worthwhile fate’. But what does that mean in post-war war Chicago? What does that mean now, even? That is the whole struggle of Augie’s adventure. Say Augie had chosen to follow through with Einhorn and become his ‘disciple’. Well, he’d probably find himself wheeling and dealing at the back of a musky pool room by the novels end. Would that have been noble? Would ‘green-eyed entrepreneur extraordinaire’ hold its own against the weight of 'life'. Not for Augie. Or if he had truly followed through with the schemes of any of the big, ‘superior’ personalities he encountered, the particulars would be different, but the general case the same: it simply wouldn’t satisfy Augie’s dream for something more. The passivity then is almost an opposition, an opposition to settle for anything less than that 'worthwhile fate'. In short, Augie wants alright, but he wants his ‘glass of water’ full and nothing in between.
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There are flaws, of course, to the novel. As brilliant as the prose can be, it can also be frustrating. First, because the mixture of knowledge required to understand the text-from Yiddish to mid-century culture to philosophy to medieval art-can be disorienting. Martin Amis said of this mixture: ‘for all its marvels, Augie March…often resembles a lecture on destiny fed through a thesaurus of low-life patois.’ I think this is true in some small portions of the book. But for most I find the mixture exhilarating. It’s only when my knowledge is lacking in the subject at hand that it becomes frustrating. But that, then, says more of me than the novel.

The prose can also be frustrating though for its ambiguity. Some analogies, for instance, seem a little stretched or unclear. Some sentences themselves are also simply just difficult to parse. Take for instance a scene where Augie is at a bar trying to strike a coal bargain. Bellow describes the scene as thus:

We took the coal-and-ice dealers into taverns and drank beer and swapped talk , in those sleepy and dark with heat joints where the very flies crept rather then flew, seeming doped by the urinal camphors and malt sourness, and from the heated emptiness and wood-block-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only more constriction to the unlocatable, undiagnosed wrong. If you thought towards something outside, it might be towards Padilla theorizing on the size of the universe; his scientific interest kept the subject from being grim. (p.248)

So far, fantastic. Bellow picks the perfect notes of interest to bring out the scene, jumping from camphor doped flies to universe philosophizing physicists. Then:

But in such places the slow hairy fly-crawl from drop to drop and star to star, you could pray the non-human universe was not entered from here, and this was no sack-end of it that happened to touch Cook County and Northern Illinois.

Here, I’ll be honest; I’m not sure what that sentence even means. Perhaps it’s a mistake. Such sentences are, to be sure, few and far between. But they are there.

The other issue I found with the book was the Mexico interlude, where Augie, swept off his feet by Thea, moves down south with her to hunt lizards with a trained eagle. Without going into too much plot detail, my issue with the section was twofold. First, I simply did not feel the love between Thea and Augie. It’s a simple complaint but an important one. We know Augie is moved deeply and what moves him is manifold. He even says, somewhat self-deprecatingly “I was stirred in all kinds of ways, including the soft shuffle in the treetop leaves just broken out of thick red beaks” (p.329). And we can feel these stirrings when Augie describes them. But when Thea comes along we know so little about her we’re not even sure what he’s falling in love with. To be fair, Augie isn’t sure himself. But Augie’s love for Thea is never discernibly elevated above his stirrings after the ‘shuffling treetop leaves’. And to be quite honest, Thea herself isn’t that likable of a character. I much prefer Augie’s old flame, Mimi Villars. There, I felt the connection much more. I, of course, am not writing as a gossip columnist playing preferences, but simply saying that if Bellow intended Thea to be the thunderbolt that struck Augie’s heart it would help for that thunderbolt to be felt by then reader as well.

The second issue I have with interlude is that its role within the novel is unclear. Here we have Augie training an eagle, the quintessential symbol of America, and yet what Bellow means to convey by this is never clear. Does the eagle represent America in some way? Well, if it does, why the name “Caligula”? Perhaps Bellow wanted to convey how differently Augie-the ever sympathetic young man-interpreted the eagle's ultimate weakness in lizard hunting to how Thea-the ever stubborn young woman-interpreted it. But if this interpretation follows logically, it does not follow emotionally. That is to say, at most the reader can get a logically consistent reading of this section, but not an emotionally moving one which drives Bellow’s point home on the visceral level.
Yet, there are sparks of brilliance even here, in this bizarre Mexican adventure, as Bellow describes the landscape and its various characters. It’s almost as if Bellow provides a brief spark of insight which forces the reader forward, and then just as the momentum is about to die out form this, he sparks forth with another such insight.
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I opened this essay noting how frequently I am asked about what I want to do with my life. Particularly, ‘what do I want to major in’? I opened with this partly as a maybe-not-so-successful attempt to draw the reader in, but mainly because I found it strikingly similar how Augie and I struggle in such similar ways to answer such similar questions. For instance, the trouble I have with answering the ‘what major’ question is that to major in something implies so much specificity. That is, to major in applied math means to, for all realistic purposes, ignore English literature save for when you have the spare time on the weekend. It’s almost as if you must choose one thing to the exclusion of others. Here’s Augie on the matter, 50 years earlier:

‘You know why I struck people funny? I think it was because of the division of labor. Specialization was leaving the likes of me behind. I didn’t know spot-wielding, I didn’t know traffic management, I couldn’t remove an appendix, or anything like that.' (p. 472)

Take that paragraph and replace the last sentence with something like: ‘I didn’t know computer programming, I didn’t know the politics of foreign policy in industrial China, I couldn’t extract DNA from a lab rat, or anything of the sort.’ You see, then, how relevant the statement is today. Probably even more so. So what do the people like Augie, with these strivings for nobility, do in such a labor divided world? Become a blogosphere poet reflecting on anything and everything (one character in the novel observes how whenever he writes a dramatic poem, he can’t understand how any of his characters would want to be anything but a poet)?

Augie himself comes up with no clear answer, but he still has his moments of clarity. Like where he lays on his couch thinking of ‘axial lines’ .

I have a feeling…about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or your existence is merely clownery, hiding tragedy. I must have had a feeling since I was a kid about these axial lines which made me want to have my existence by them, and so I have said ‘no’ like a stubborn fellow to my persuaders, just on my obstinacy to my memory of these lines, never entirely clear. But lately I have felt these thrilling lines again. When striving stops, there they are as a gift. I was lying on the couch here before and they suddenly went quivering right straight through me. Truth, love peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony! …And I believe that any man at any time can come back to these axial lines, even if an unfortunate bastard, if he will be quite and wait it out. The ambition of something special and outstanding I have always had is only a boast that distorts this knowledge from its origin, which is the oldest knowledge, older than the Euphrates, older than the Ganges. (p.494)

This is one of those insights that perhaps only comes on full force when read within the context of the novel. But what the passage is getting at should be clear to anyone. You can read it on probably half the facebook pages you come across. For, what Augie is saying is quite simply, ‘be true to yourself.’ But pay attention to how it’s said. An axial line is a modern term, used by zoologists, geologists, physicists. Yet here’s Bellow using it to describe a knowledge ‘older than the Euphrates’. And then these axial lines are present since birth, but seem to fade as we grow older. So the metaphor doesn’t just call on one ‘to be himself’ but to revert back to an older, simpler knowledge of life.

A finicky reader may quibble on just what these ‘axial lines’ really are, or complain that ‘truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony’ is just a list of nouns, nothing more. But that’s just it; readers looking for an instruction manual on destiny are missing the very point: there is no such thing. But there are these ‘axial lines’. And I think part of the genius, intentional or not, is how Bellow seems to be striving so hard himself to call back this ancient, primordial sense of self but can only find modern terms to describe it, can only bottle the thunderbolt for the briefest moments in the most indirect way. We know that Augie wants to be straight with respect to these lines, and yet-even if we know they’re there-we don’t always know in which direction they point. We don’t know where that glass of water is.

In the above passage, along with many places throughout the book, I am reminded of a quote from William James “The Varieties of Religious Experience” we’re he describes what he calls 'dumb intuition'.

if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely KNOWS that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.

We see then, that these ‘dumb intuitions’ are very much what motivates Augie. They are the source of the passive opposition which has Augie always saying “’no’ like a stubborn fellow”. Ellen Pifer, author of “Saul Bellow: Against the Grain” has this to say on the matter: “ the central impetus of Bellow’s fiction, I believe, is a search for a language and a literary form by which these ‘dumb intuitions’ can be voiced and heard over the volubility of ‘rationalistic talk’”. The search for this language is why we see so many metaphors, so many diverse analogies and references scattered throughout Bellow’s prose. Because to hit upon these intuitions requires a bit of orchestration and literary legerdemain.

I’ve always felt that the best literature doesn’t articulate certain truths, but uncovers them for the reader. An articulation is the rationalization of a thought or feeling. But for an author to uncover that truth for a reader he can’t simply articulate it, he must lead the reader through the right emotions at the right times in the right sequence-in the same way a mathematician must make sure each line of a proof follows from the previous. But of course the variables at work for the author are the often the stuff of the unconscious, they are sticky and vague, and thus just summoning them requires a bit of work. Sometimes the work of the reader is hard too, for in order to get to the Q.E.D. he must follow along with all the emotional twists and turns of the characters and all the cultural and literary references used to conjure these emotions. But when the orchestration is right, what’s uncovered is something that penetrates deeper than any mathematical proof.

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For me Bellow hit upon several of these truths. Many of which I didn’t mention in this review (for those who’ve read the book, they include: Kayo’s lecture on man’s bitterness in ‘his chosen thing’ , Mintouchian’s bath house harangue on self-delusion, Augie’s reflection as he looks out over the snow-crested church on New Year’s day ). And while none of them have led me to figure out my destiny, my worthwhile fate (neither does Augie at the novel’s end) they have led me to think about it in a different way. To takes things a little more lightly, if you will. For, if there’s one thing that I think is often easily overlooked in Bellow’s writing it’s that much of it is quite humorous. It is not just Augie's optimism and capacity for love, but his appreciation for life's ironies that keep him moving forward. Even in the most dire situations, as when Augie is stranded in the middle of the Atlantic with another shipmate and not getting along so well, unable to start up a conversation to kill the boredom, this ironic awareness is there. Augie scolds himself:

“You have only this one person, one soul to deal with here-what’s the matter, can’t you do better? It’s enough like yours, this soul, as one lion is pretty nearly all the lions, and there are just the two here, and some of the last things of all could be said. You’re not doing so good, if you want to know the truth” (p.552)

This statement, ‘you’re not doing so good, if you want to know the truth’ is the kind I remark to myself whenever I’m sitting across from a pretty girl and can’t find the words to spark a conversation. And here’s Augie stranded on a boat with this single other (male) soul, very possibly sailing into his death, and he struggles in the same way. This is human, but also very funny. The whole struggle of Augie to find his ‘worthwhile’ fate is even a bit of a cosmic joke. That here should be this young American-Chicago born, from the slums-with airs of nobility running around from one fate to another, as if he we’re indecisively flipping through a ‘choose your own adventure’ novel. That he should continually fail in finding this fate but also keep hope in his search. Augie says of this cosmic laugh:

Or is the laugh at nature-including eternity-that it can win over us and the power of hope? Nah, nah! I think. It never will. But that probably is the joke, on one or the other, and laughing is the enigma that includes both. (p.584)

And then here I am. Bouncing around my school’s various departments, unsure of where to land. Unable to land a job or to find a girl but still believing strongly, as Augie, in love. Writing overlong, jumbled literary reviews on music forums perhaps because of highfalutin airs of my own. I am, as Simon described Augie, unable to describe what I do or in any way account for myself. But all this ceaseless striving is a little funny, no? That we should all go about it so seriously.

Excellent review, Isaac!

Tried to start Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller but stalled one page into it and didn't read for several days in a row, so I'm gonna jump into a reread of Beckett's Molloy (and eventually the whole trilogy).

Finished Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor. Review here.

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is next.

Review, or rather, musings on Whitman and Nietzsche and why I still like the grumpy German more in one sense but not every sense.

Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow, here we go.

Fantastic writeup, Pnoom. I think you may be at your rhetorical best when you are comparing figures.

Thanks, and I agree that that is where I am at my best. In general my ideas flourish best in conversation with other people. If I don't have actual physical speaking bodies around me, or some form of online chatting, mediating a conversation between two dead guys is probably the closest I can get.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Between Conrad and Nabokov, it's very possible the greatest English-language prose stylist is not even a native English speaker.

Yesssssssssssssss. Is this your first time reading it?

Conrad is as influential as Joyce on modern literature. As Bloom says, the major American novelists of the first half of the 20th century all mingled Conrad with another American influence. Conrad + Melville = Faulkner, Conrad + James = Fitzgerald, Conrad + Twain = Hemingway.

I think I read it in middle school or even earlier but obviously wasn't in the place to appreciate it and remember pretty much nothing from it besides the general image of a dark and scary river.

I'm beginning part 3 and I started reading it aloud and I don't know why I don't read everything this way. It's so much better.

Oh, cool. I mention I start reading Heart of Darkness; no fucks given. Tudwell mentions it, and Dreww pops a chubby.

edit: Although I did finish it, and one of the few books I'll give a 10/10.