The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow(1953)
Extract
I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style.
A boy grows up in Depression-era Chicago, raised by a cunning grandmother and a gentle, half-blind mother, and decides early he will not be recruited to anyone else's version of his life. Saul Bellow published this novel in 1953 and cracked open American fiction like a window thrown wide in a stuffy room. Augie narrates with exuberant energy, careening through odd jobs, love affairs, and entanglements from Chicago's slums to the hills of Mexico. The novel refuses the tight construction of its era, choosing instead abundance, digression, the sheer pleasure of a mind in motion. Bellow proved that an intellectual novel could also be joyful. Augie's declaration, "I am an American, Chicago born," announced a new music in the language.
If you loved this
Twain invented the restless American voice Bellow inherits: the same picaresque, the same refusal to be claimed.
Cervantes sends another man through the world collecting experiences and delusions, and the appetite is just as enormous.
Dickens builds another story of a young man making himself, but Pip submits where Augie refuses.