Saul Bellow

There's no way around it: The Adventures of Augie March is an exceptional novel: indeed, in many ways, it is the quintessential American novel, easily comparable with other great books of the twentieth century. 

Much can be said about Augie March, but for me, the most impressive part must be Bellow's capacity to construct characters. The sheer number of personalities in Augie is staggering: each of them with background, history, and ambition. It is hard to imagine how a novel with this many people could come together so seamlessly: and yet it does. Augie March really is a triumph of the human intellect. 

Another part of the novel which resonated me with me was Bellow's insistence -- his very patient insistence -- on the idea of journey. Toward the end of the book, Augie confronts his adventures; he's meandered this way and that (and spent one hundred and fifty pages in rural Mexico training an eagle). But in a very real sense, he's arrived. The path was a circuitous one, no doubt; but that does not call into question the reality of what he's discovered. It's as if Bellow subjects Augie to repeated tangents and temptation only to prove a singular point: you can be sent home a failure -- you can be dismissed and dejected -- but that doesn't make your discovery any less real. The thing you've seen is true; there's something solid beneath your feet. 

The Adventures of Augie March is just that: a set of uniquely American adventures. There is very little social hierarchy or family lineage. There is a focus on money, but only in the sense of questing after the impossible. Augie ends the book in Paris, but it takes him six hundred pages to get there, to work his way through the boundless potential of that thing called America. Bellow has presented a moving and infinitely layered rendering of the country between the wars. For the believability and three dimensionality of Bellows's characters alone, this novel is worthy of continued celebration.