What I really enjoyed in the novel was Bellow's entire cast of characters. The novel is narrated in the first person by the titular Augie March. Augie tells the story of his life from his early childhood on the South side of Chicago during the depression to his time in Paris as a married man in his mid- to late-twenties. His adventures are filled with many wonderful odd and fantastically-sketched people who run in and out of his life. And all these characters have their own motives, desires, and designs that dictate what they do. Bellow has an excellent eye for characters. None of them makes a false move or does something solely for the movement of the plot. Each action is true to that character, and that is an impressive feat.
Augie himself is drawn with precision and consistency, and given how long the novel is, that too is impressive. Unlike most first-person narrators, Augie is reliable in his account of his actions, motives, thoughts as well as those of others. The continuous theme in Augie's life is that he is someone who "other people are always trying to fit into their schemes":
External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that's what their power is.Augie keeps running into people who attempt to "recruit" him, as he says. But Augie also knows that he's "got opposition in" him too, and after being pulled in by these recruiters, he continually pulls away, giving up what he has been given for freedom to decide things for himself. Aware of this tendency in others to recruit, Augie goes out of his way to avoid recruiting his readers. Augie openly discusses his ugly impulses and his noble ones. There is not a character that crosses his path in whom Augie doesn't find something admirable, something ugly, something good, and something bad.
Those moments of analysis and insight are some of the novels most enjoyable passages and rewarding parts. Augie himself, in his even-keeled approach to others and honest reporting of his own actions, is a very likeable guy.
But in making such a likable and even-keeled character, Bellow has a hard time putting Augie into compelling situations. As a reader, I never once worried about Augie. I always had the same distance that he did and I never really felt like anything was risked.
For example, when Augie is engaged to Lucy, his brother's wife's cousin, he is on tenuous ground with Lucy's family. Lucy has money and is a possible escape from poverty for Augie. Meanwhile, Augie's neighbor Mimi becomes pregnant by her boyfriend and relies on Augie to help her obtain an abortion. As Augie joins her in a trip to the doctor, Augie is seen with Mimi leaning against him by another one of Lucy's cousins who has it in for Augie. His goose is cooked. He can't possibly expect Lucy's family to believe the truth. But there is zero point zero drama in this entire exchange. Augie doesn't really care all that much for Lucy anyway, and he doesn't really care all that much for money either. He's not even really bothered that he's going to be accused of something that isn't so.
The only time Augie even cares about a major change in his life is when Thea leaves him. But by this point, Augie's resilience is so well established that I was never worried about his well being. I knew that he would make it through with no real sense of loss or pain, that he would keep on keeping on and find love again.
There was nothing to pull me on other than idle curiosity (and my desire to have read the book for the sake of this project). It took me three months to read The Adventures of Augie March. Now that's not all Bellow's fault, of course. Part of the slow-going was because I am a slow reader. Another part was because my October, November, and early December were incredibly busy, and my work ate up all my spare time. But I imagine I would have made more time to read had the movement of Augie's story been more compelling. I didn't try to sneak in a paragraph here or there to see what happened, because even when something was happening (and a lot did happen) it didn't hold any emotional weight.
(As a side note, I discovered reading this novel, that I am a big fan of meaty scenes in a novel. I love when a scene takes place and characters, grounded in a physical location, act and react to each other and move the story on by their exchanges and interactions. So much of The Adventures of Augie March is about thoughts and theories and large actions that there are very few scenes that hold much weight. The scenes that do take place give us bits of dialogue and interesting exchanges but nothing much to chew on.)
For all the things the book had going for it--character, sharp writing, interesting observations about life and purpose--this lack of propulsion and emotional contact undercut my ability to enjoy the novel. If you read it, I hope you are able to get more out of it than I did.
