[In the following review, Rolo argues that The Adventures of Augie March presents the “archetypal” story of “the American as a rolling stone” but notes that the novel's protagonist lacks emotional depth.]

Saul Bellow, who is now publishing his third novel, The Adventures of Augie March, has taken a fruitful hint from Cervantes's great parody of a classic Spanish type. His hero-narrator—in whom there is a “laughing creature” forever rising up—unfolds to us a slightly kidding but essentially serious version of an archetypal American saga: the saga of the American as a rolling stone, an irrepressible explorer who doesn't quite know who he is and is always trying “to become what I am”; who keeps seeking the fullest experience of life. The self-educated Augie tells his story in a freshly personal style which intermixes slang and literary English, and which has a quality rare in contemporary American fiction—a great variety of tone: grimness and exuberance, touches of clowning and touches of the fantastic; a current of comedy and intimations of the tragic.

Augie March comes of a poor Jewish family in Chicago. His father has vanished, and the ruling influence of his childhood is Grandma Lausch, who has known plushier days in Odessa. This picturesque old matriarch is one of a dozen or more sharply individual characterizations in Mr. Bellow's spacious novel, whose settings range from the slums to the abodes and playgrounds of the rich.

By the time he is a high-school junior and the Depression has set in, Augie has sampled half a dozen jobs; has once been fired for stealing; and has dabbled in more serious crime. A lucky break turns him into a salesman of expensive sporting goods on the millionaire circuit in Evanston. His wealthy employers take him into their home; polish him up generally; and acquaint him with the life of luxury. But when they want to adopt him and arrange his future, Augie moves on. And when his hardheaded, successful brother has found a rich wife for him and staked him to a job, Augie moves on again.

He moves from job to job, from girl to girl. He has a consuming and bizarre love affair with a glamorous millionairess who takes him to Mexico to help her train eagles, and who eventually leaves him down and out. When we see the last of him—though he is now married to a lovely and erratic siren—he is still the adventurer, chasing after big deals in Europe on behalf of an Armenian tycoon.

With its variousness, its vitality, its strong sense that life is worth living, Mr. Bellow's novel is a notable achievement, and it should be one of the year's outstanding successes. I cannot suppress a slight regret that a novelist with as large a talent as Mr. Bellow's has not tried to take us more deeply inside his hero. His story, at times, comes perilously close to being a catalogue of actions. It certainly tells us all about Augie March; but I do not even begin to know and understand him in the way the reader knows and understands, say, Stendhal's Julien Sorel.