Saul Bellow - Augie March

Canadian smooth operator

By Harry Rose

America – unlike, say, Britain but a bit like, say, France – is more than a nation, it’s a set of ideas. A novel can, therefore, be American even if its author, as with The Adventures of Augie March, is – in a technical sense – Canadian.

What’s more, Saul Bellow’s masterpiece is as richly American – in its themes, its scope and its values – as all those ‘great American novels’, some of which also carry the prefix The Adventures of…

‘I am an American, Chicago born’, states Augie, at the outset. What follows is the life story of a man who drifts from job to job – salesman, butler, dog-walker, union rep; who reverts, when needs must, to theft; and who all the time wants to study and learn. He is determined to be free, not to be ‘domesticated.’

Augie speaks of the “universal eligibility to be noble” – as succinct an expression of the American dream as you’ll get.

He doesn’t really achieve the dream but then, as the writer Christopher Hitchens has noted, ‘it’s an ideal, not a promise’. He lives, furthermore, a life of opposition, adversity, and independence, all of which, by the end, seem far more to the point.