Just Finished Reading The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

When I was recently writing about another book I just read, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, I discovered a listing of what a couple of literary critics from Time Magazine deemed as the best American novels since 1923, the year of that publication's founding.  The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow was on it, and since I had already read another of his books, Herzog, I decided to check out this one, too.  I'm glad I did...

The character of Augie March narrates his own life story as he traces his relationship from childhood through his adolescence and young adult years. The setting is the 1920s through the 40s as Augie recounts his Chicago upbringing in a Jewish family, largely by "Grandma", an unrelated elderly fellow tenant who dominates his abandoned, simple-minded mother, himself, his older brother Simon, and his younger brother George, also intellectually challenged.  As Augie matures, he finds his life a string of passages from one set of circumstances and relationships to another, both in regard to career, friendships, and romance.  It seems that he is constantly running into situations in which he is acting in subservience to another's agenda...and begins to develop his own philosophy of life: one in which he is the driving force and not others.  But can Augie escape his life's pattern of relationships?  I guess that is something that we all have to ask ourselves: whether fate will steer us unobligingly in its own direction or whether we can change it ourselves...

The Adventures of Augie March, while presenting a very sympathetic character, also vividly portrayed what life in urban Chicago must have been like back in the early-to-mid twentieth century...including the Great Depression and World War II years.  This book is loaded to the hilt with humor, and I found myself chuckling at different points.  Saul Bellow, I imagine, wrote a lot of his own life into Augie's story...including his own sometimes tempestuous relationship with his older brother.  He breathed depth and life into all of the characters...even minor ones...and gave them a sense of real existence that few authors have been able to accomplish.  But we are speaking about Saul Bellow, of course: a great American author...

And now I'm starting on my third Saul Bellow book: Humboldt's Gift...