Rating: 
Summary: Among Bellow's Best
Review: As an author with my debut novel in its initial release, I am a great admirer of Saul Bellow. I think highly of all of his works, and I consider his ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH among his finest novels. To some degree, I suppose because of its title, I've always considered this book Bellow's 20th Century version of Mark Twain's 19th Century THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Augie March has also consistently reminded me of Tom Jones (the Fielding character, not the Welsh singer). Bellow's novel follows the picaresque adventures of a young man searching for a worthwhile fate. His adventures are believable, honest, and often hilarious. THE ADVENTRUES OF AUGIE MARCH is a landmark of 20th Century American literature.
Rating: 
Summary: The Wild Oats Years
Review: Augie March had an interesting life in his teens and twenties. We follow him through the Great Depression and WW2. The Depression is summed up in a rich, cagy cripple named Einhorn. The war is largely spent in a lifeboat with a maniac.Augie's greatest adventures are romantic. The leading ladies are assertive Thea Fenchel and beautiful Stella. Thea chases Augie down, despite the fact that it is her sister who Augie has a crush on. But Augie is led by the nose, and doesn't have a chance against a strong willed woman. She drags him to Mexico to bag an eagle and train it to hunt giant lizards. Like Augie, the eagle disappoints her. Then there's beautiful Stella, damsel in distress, asking Augie to rescue her from a man and a situation. Thea says Don't you dare! But our Augie can't say no to a damsel in distress. When he is rescuing her the car breaks down, they spend the night together, yada yada yada. In the end, Augie ends up marrying someone. He's the type of guy who really just wants unity with a special someone, a loving wife and a happy family. Either of these girls could have bagged him like an eagle in a sack. So could any other girl with a strong will. Just grab him by the ear and pull him to the Justice of the Peace.
Rating:
Summary: Life Is Worth Living
Review: Augie's epiphany that even while just getting through the struggle to earn a living "hard work was going on, underneath" forming one's character remains with me years later. This novel is not light reading, you've got to stick with it. And you may feel The Adventures Of Augie March is a flop. "Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America."
Rating:
Summary: Impressive and yet- Saul and Augie, can't we get on with it?
Review: For what has been widely described as both a picaresque and coming-of-age novel, Augie March is neither a quick read nor an easy one. Okay, there's no rule that requires novels in these categories to be either. But still and all, one somehow feels uneasy, given the various changes in locale and steady aging of the protagonist, that Bellow (or Augie) so steadfastly refuses to get on with it already. Much of the novel is rendered in a convoluted narrative style-Augie's voice-that may be termed ornate. Or off-putting. Or ornately off-putting. Intended to echo, presumably, the Yiddish, German and Russian speech patterns Augie grows up hearing in Chicago during the twenties and thirties, this narrative device may in fact do that; but its syntactical wanderings soon begin to remind one, whatever their authenticity, of the criticism once leveled at Henry Luce's beloved Timestyle: "Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind." Lexicon also figures in the curious mix, as words are combined in unexpected ways-sometimes cleverly (and with a kind of mini-revelation effect: you mean you can say that?) but just as often, apparently, randomly--just for the heck of it. Augie likes to talk (write), and what comes out, comes out: "Many repeated pressures with the same effect as one strong blow, that was [Einhorn's] method, he said, and it was his special pride that he knew how to use the means contributed by the age to connive as ably as anyone else; when in a not so advanced time he'd have been mummy-handled in a hut or somebody might have had to help him be a beggar in front of a church, the next thing to a memento mori or, more awful, a reminder of what difficulties there were before you could even become dead." [...] "On the final day she watched the trunk wag down the front stairs, on the back of the mover, with an amazing, terrible look of presidency, and supervised everything, every last box, in this fashion, gruesomely and violently white so that her mouth's corner hairs were minutely apparent, but in rigid-backed aristocracy, full face to the important transfer to something better from this (now that she turned from it) disgracefully shabby flat of a deserted woman and her sons whom she had preserved while a temporary guest." [...] "Quiet, quiet, quiet afternoon in the back-room study, with an oil cloth on the library table, invisible cars snoring and trembling toward the park, the sun shining into the yard outside the window barred against housebreakers, billiard balls kissing and bounding on the felt and sponge rubber, and the undertaker's back door still and stiller, cats sitting on the paths in the Lutheran gardens over the alley that were swept and garnished and scarcely ever trod by the chin-tied Danish deaconesses who'd come out on the cradle-ribbed and always fresh-painted porches of their home." There is much to be enjoyed and admired in all this-but at a pace, of course, that can only be determinedly leisurely, as sentences and paragraphs (often enough the same thing) demand re-reading for full appreciation. And while one is doing the necessary appreciating, a small voice in some northwest anterior lobe of the reader's brainpan is becoming more insistent all the while: yes-yes, but where is this getting us? An interesting cast of characters is presented; the novel's locations are admirably painted in; the years move along, from the twenties through the Crash, the Depression and the war; and yet the principal development one cannot help but wait for-Augie's, as these are his adventures, after all-simply does not, well, develop. The hero is a listener, a passive-aggressive; he has considerable native intelligence and a hungry mind, but no real resolve to put either to work for his own benefit or that of others. Ideas, ideologies, approaches to life and love and various behavior patterns are introduced to Augie; he picks and chooses, learns and doesn't learn, sort of grows and doesn't grow. In the end, working in post-war Europe as a middle-level black marketeer, the hero is in fact little changed from the Chicago street urchin of two decades before. And little concerned by this fact. Which leads one to wonder: should anyone else be? Are we not vastly more concerned over the fate of Tom Jones, or Holden Caufield, or (closer to home here) Duddy Kravitz-or just about any other coming-of-age/picaresque hero you can think of ? Yes, we are. Augie March's dilemma-what exactly he wants to do with his life-has taken up a dense 557 pages and remained unresolved. This has been called "existential." Fine. No one says that life offers everyone a workable "resolution." But that may be why novels aren't written about everyone. Whatever name one assigns Augie's condition, in any case, the fact remains that all his adventuring leaves him in a state of self-inflicted inconclusiveness-and leaves us muttering okay, okay-get on with it!
Rating: 
Summary: Economical! You may never have to buy another book EVER!
Review: Have you ever spent 3 days reading a book only to find that you're still on page 18? Well, neither have I until now. And no, it is NOT because I'm a slow reader. I've managed to plow through long or "difficult" novels with nary a hitch. Augie's picaresque adventures, however, make both "The Sound and the Fury" and the unabridged version of The Count of Monte-Cristo seem like Hemmingway's terse prose. Saul Bellow manages to place you, gentle reader, in an alternate BIZZARO universe where time passes while events around you unfold at breakneck speed. During Dingbat's stint as manager for the sea-sick boxer, I happened to observe the sun and clouds race across the sky as they invariably do in cheesy B-movie remakes of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine". My young bride was an aged crone by the time that dang lizard came around. I want my life back! What the? Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!
Rating:
Summary: He Tries!
Review: He is a good-hearted young man who tries to make a go of it, but, as Stella says, falls into the whims and desires of so many people he meets. He is taken along on a trip to smuggle people form Canada, goes along with his brother's whims and practically marries a woman chosen for him, goes to the shore with an employer, who wants to adopt him, runs off to Mexico with a strange woman and her eagle, ends up in Europe with yet another woman he doesn't say no to, and finds that marriage is less than he would have wanted. He doesn't seem to be able to take control of his own life. Undoubtedly there are many people like this, good hearted with a streak of innocence, but winding up with something less than success. And throughout the book one can see Bellow's disenchantment with rampant Capitalism, which is evident with the successful men in Augies experiences. I like Augie, and I sympathize with him. It's a good read . . get to know him, and learn about yourself.
Rating:
Summary: He Tries!
Review: He is a good-hearted young man who tries to make a go of it, but, as Stella says, falls into the whims and desires of so many people he meets. He is taken along on a trip to smuggle people form Canada, goes along with his brother's whims and practically marries a woman chosen for him, goes to the shore with an employer, who wants to adopt him, runs off to Mexico with a strange woman and her eagle, ends up in Europe with yet another woman he doesn't say no to, and finds that marriage is less than he would have wanted. He doesn't seem to be able to take control of his own life. Undoubtedly there are many people like this, good hearted with a streak of innocence, but winding up with something less than success. And throughout the book one can see Bellow's disenchantment with rampant Capitalism, which is evident with the successful men in Augies experiences. I like Augie, and I sympathize with him. It's a good read . . get to know him, and learn about yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: Phew.
Review: I know - it was important in its time, but this book was one thankless slog for me. I so desperately wanted there to have been an editor, even though I know that its length and serial nature were groundbreaking at the time. I felt like I was back in highschool English class, in its worst incarnation.
Rating:
Summary: A book everyone should read in college.
Review: I read this book as a senior in college, and I was disappointed that I didn't get exposed to it earlier. While the prose is self-indulgent at times, the story is reassuring. Augie's fate isn't woeful as other reviews suggest; it has more to do with starting a clean slate after unsuccessfully tasting many different options in one's life. The reader learns that Augie is a smart guy, and probably could have been much more than he was, but he is burdened by something intrinsic to his nature: the requirement of trial and error.
Rating:
Summary: American literature.
Review: I used to think american literature was useless. Now I'm starting to see that there are many gems hidden inside them. There are reasons why some books do well and others do not.
This all has to do with truth. The books that are older and still seem to be around are books of truth. "A lie lasts for a moment, but the truth lasts a lifetime."
-Calvin Newman
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