[In the following essay, Amis labels The Adventures of Augie March as the “Great American Novel” and presents an overview of the characteristics that render the novel as a distinctly American work.]

The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel. Search no further. All the trails went cold forty-two years ago. The quest did what quests very rarely do: it ended.

But what was that quest anyway—itself so essentially American? No literary masterpiece or federal epic is mentioned in the Constitution as one of the privileges and treats guaranteed to the populace, along with things like liberty and life and the right to bear computerized MAC-10s. Still, it is easy enough to imagine how such an aspiration might have developed. As its culture was evolving, and as cultural self-consciousness dawned, America found itself to be a youthful, vast, and various land, peopled by non-Americans. So how about this place? Was it a continental holding camp for Greeks, Jews, Brits, Italians, Scandinavians, and Lithuanians, together with the remaining Amerindians from Ice Age Mongolia? Or was it a nation, with an identity—with a soul? Who could begin to give the answers? Amid such diversity, who could crystallize the American experience?

Like most quests, the quest for the Great American Novel seemed destined to be endless. In general you won't find that mythical beast, that Holy Grail, that earthly Eden—though you have to keep looking. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit is the thing; you are never going to catch up. It was very American to insist on having a Great American Novel, thus rounding off all the other benefits Americans enjoy. Nobody has ever worried about the Great French Novel or the Great Russian Novel (though it is entirely intelligible that there should be some cautious talk about the Great Australian Novel). Trying to find the Great American Novel, rolling up your sleeves and trying to write it: this was American. And so it would go on, forever, just as literature never progresses or improves but simply evolves and provides the model. The Great American Novel was a chimera; this mythical beast was a pig with wings. Miraculously, however, and uncovenantedly, Saul Bellow brought the animal home. Bellow sorted it. He dedicated the book to his father and published it in 1953 and then settled down to write Seize the Day.

Literary criticism, as normally practiced, will tend to get in the way of a novel like The Adventures of Augie March. Shaped (loosely) as an odyssey, and well stocked with (unsystematic) erudition, with invocations and incantations, the book is very vulnerable to the kind of glossarial jigsaw solver who must find form: pattern, decor, lamination, color scheme. But that isn't how the novel works on you. Books are partly about life and partly about other books. Some books are largely about other books, and spawn yet other books. Augie March is all about life: it brings you up against the dead end of life. Bellow's third novel, following the somewhat straitened performances of Dangling Man and The Victim, is above all free—without inhibition. An epic about the so-called ordinary, it is a marvel of remorseless spontaneity. As a critic, therefore, you feel no urge to interpose yourself. Your job is to work your way round to the bits you want to quote. You are a guide in a gallery where the signs say SILENCE, PLEASE; you are shepherding your group from spectacle to spectacle—awed, humbled, and trying, as far as possible, to keep your mouth shut.

A brief outline: The Adventures of Augie March is about the formation of an identity, of a soul—that of a fatherless and penniless boy growing up in and around Depression-era Chicago. Augie's mother is “simple-minded,” and so is his younger brother, Georgie, who “was born an idiot.” Simon, his older brother, is hardheaded; and Simon is all Augie's got. The domestic configuration is established early on, with typical pathos and truthfulness.

Never but at such times, by necessity, was my father mentioned. I claimed to remember him; Simon denied that I did, and Simon was right. I liked to imagine it.

“He wore a uniform,” I said. “Sure I remember. He was a soldier.”

“Like hell he was. You don't know anything about it.”

“Maybe a sailor.”

“Like hell. He drove a truck for Hall Brothers laundry on Marshfield, that's what he did.”

His mother sewed buttonholes at a coat factory in a Wells Street loft, and his father was a laundry driver; and Augie is simply “the by-blow of a traveling man.”

What comes across in these early pages—the novel's first act—is the depth of the human divide between the hard and the soft. The home, with its closed circle, tries to be soft. The outside world is all hard—isn't it? (It certainly looks hard.) Georgie is soft. He puts “his underlip forward” in search of a kiss, “chaste, lummoxy, caressing, gentle and diligent.” Given his chicken gizzard at noon, he “blew at the ridgy thing more to cherish than to cool it.” Later Georgie sits at the kitchen table “with one foot stepping on the other” while his grim future is grimly discussed. This leads to the famously unbearable scene in which Augie accompanies his brother to the institution.

We were about an hour getting to the Home—wired windows, dog-proof cyclone fence, asphalt yard, great gloom. … We were allowed to go up to the dormitory with him, where other kids stood around under the radiator high on the wall and watched us. Mama took off George's coat and the manly hat, and in his shirt of large buttons, with whitish head and big white, chill fingers—it was troubling they were so man-sized—he kept by me beside the bed while I again showed him the simple little stunt of the satchel lock. But I failed to distract him from the terror of the place and of boys like himself around—he had never met such before. And now he realized that we would leave him and he began to do with his soul, that is, to let out his moan, worse for us than tears, though many grades below the pitch of weeping. Then Mama slumped down and gave in utterly. It was when she had the bristles of his special head between her hands and was kissing him that she began to cry. When I started after a while to draw her away he tried to follow. I cried also. I took him back to the bed and said, “Sit here.” So he sat and moaned. We went down to the car stop and stood waiting by the black, humming pole for the trolley to come back from city limits.

Mama, too, simple, abandoned, a fool for love, is soft. As with Georgie, when Augie evokes his mother he accords her the beauty and mystery of a child. Family disruptions (of which there are many) frighten her: “she was upright in her posture and like waiting for the grief to come to a stop; as if this stop would be called by a conductor.” But her distress is also adult, intimidating, unreachable. In the days after the decision is made to commit Georgie, Mama

made no fuss or noise nor was seen weeping, but in an extreme and terrible way seemed to be watching out the kitchen window, until you came close and saw the tear-strengthened color of her green eyes and of her pink face, her gap-toothed mouth. … she lay herself dumbly on the outcome of forces, without any work of mind. …

In Augie's childhood world, with its hesitancy and its peeled senses, it is as if everybody is too delicate to be touched. Too soft, or too hard—like Simon. Simon is Augie's parallel self: the road not traveled. All Simon ever does is set himself the task of becoming a high-grade American barbarian; but on the page he becomes a figure of Shakespearean solidity, rendered with Dickensian force. And there is a kind of supercharged logic here. To the younger brother, the older brother fills the sky, and will assume these unholy dimensions. Simon sweats and fumes over the novel. Even when he is absent, he is always there.

Parentless and penniless: the basic human material. Penniless, Augie needs employment. If the novels of another great Chicagoan, Theodore Dreiser, sometimes feel like a long succession of job interviews, then Augie March often resembles a surrealist catalogue of apprenticeships. During the course of the novel Augie becomes (in order) a handbill distributor, a paper boy, a dime-store packer, a news vendor, a Christmas extra in a toy department, a flower deliverer, a butler, a shoe salesman, a saddle-shop floorwalker, a hawker of rubberized paint, a dog washer, a book swiper, a coal-yard helper, a housing surveyor, a union organizer, an animal trainer, a gambler, a literary researcher, a salesman of business machines, a sailor, and a middleman for a war profiteer. As late as a third of the way into the novel Augie is still poring over magazines in search of “vocational hints.”

“All the influences were waiting for me. I was born, and there they were to form me. …” Malleable and protean, “easily appealed to,” busy “trying various things on,” Augie is a natural protégé, willing prey for the nearest “reality instructor”: would-be “big personalities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildoers, big-wheels and imposers-upon, absolutists.” First there is Grandma Lausch (no relation), the old widow who directs and manipulates the March family with the power-crazed detachment of a eugenicist. “Her eyes whitely contemptuous, with a terrible little naked yawn of her gums, suck-cheeked with unspoken comment,” Grandma Lausch is definitely of the hardness party. But she is Old World, Odessan, “Eastern”; and Augie's subsequent mentors are embodiments of specifically American strategies and visions, as their names suggest: Mr. Einhorn, Dingbat, Mrs. Renling, Joe Gorman, Manny Padilla, Clem Tambow, Kayo Obermark, Robey, Mintouchian, Basteshaw (and Simon—always Simon). With each of these lower-case “universalists”—who believe that wherever they happen to be standing, “the principal laws [are] underfoot”—Augie goes a certain distance until he finds himself “in the end zone” of his adaptability. Then he breaks free.

So what are all these roles and models, these outfits and uniforms, these performances? Augie is on a journey but he isn't going anywhere. If he has a destination, it is simply a stop called Full Consciousness. In a sense Augie is heading to the point where he will become the author of his own story. He will not necessarily be capable of writing it. He will be capable of thinking it. This is what the convention of the first person amounts to. The narrator expresses his thoughts, and the novelist gives them written shape. Like all narrators, Augie is a performing artist (as a young man). And it is Bellow who provides his portrait.

The artist, perhaps uniquely and definingly, gets through life without belonging to anything: no organization, no human conglomerate. Everybody in Augie's immediate familial orbit is eventually confined to an institution—even Simon, who commits himself to the association of American money. A leaf in the wind of random influences, Augie wafts through various establishments and big concerns, leagues, cliques, and syndicates. As he does so, it becomes increasingly clear that whatever identity is, whatever the soul is, the institution is its opposite and its enemy. This commonplace does not remain a commonplace under Augie's gaze. Human amalgamation attacks his very sensorium, inspiring animal bafflement and visionary rage. Dickens's institutions are eccentric; Bellow's are psychopathic. Small isn't always beautiful, but big vibrates with meshuggah power.

This is the dispensary:

like the dream of a multitude of dentists' chairs, hundreds of them in a space as enormous as an armory, and green bowls with designs of glass grapes, drills lifted zigzag as insects' legs, and gas flames on the porcelain swivel trays—a thundery gloom in Harrison Street of limestone county buildings and cumbersome red street-cars with metal grillwork on their windows and monarchical iron whiskers of cowcatchers front and rear. They lumbered and clanged, and their brake tanks panted in the slushy brown of a winter afternoon or the bare stone brown of a summer's, salted with ash, smoke, and prairie dust, with long stops at the clinics to let off clumpers, cripples, hunchbacks, brace-legs, crutch-wielders, tooth and eye sufferers, and all the rest.

This is the dime store:

that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chickenfeed, jewelry, drygoods, oilcloth … and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue—the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash, and blackened forms of five-story buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops.

And this is the old folks' home, where Grandma goes:

We came up the walk, between the slow, thought-brewing, beat-up old heads, liver-spotted, of choked old blood salts and wastes, hard and bone-bare domes, or swollen, the elevens of sinews up on collarless necks crazy with the assaults of Kansas heats and Wyoming freezes. … white hair and rashy, vessel-busted hands holding canes, fans, newspapers in all languages and alphabets, faces gone in the under-surface flues and in the eyes, of these people sitting in the sunshine and leaf-burning outside or in the mealy moldiness and gravy acids in the house.

Such writing is of course animated by love as well as pity and protest. And there are certain institutions and establishments to which Augie is insidiously drawn. The pool hall, for instance, and the anti-institution of crime. Here is Augie, in a new kind of uniform:

Grandma Lausch would have thought that the very worst she had ever said about me let me off too lightly, seeing me in the shoeshine seat above the green tables, in a hat with diamond air-holes cut in it and decorated with brass kiss-me pins and Al Smith buttons, in sneakers and Mohawk sweatshirt, there in the frying jazz and the buzz of baseball broadcasts, the click of markers, butt thumping of cues, spat-out pollyseed shells and blue chalk crushed underfoot and dust of hand-slickening talcum hanging in the air.

That frying jazz! Criminals are attractive because their sharply individualized energies seem to operate outside the established social arrangement. Augie is deeply candid, but he is not especially honest. Invited along on a housebreaking job, Augie doesn't give any reason for saying yes; he simply announces that he didn't say no.

“Are you a real crook?” Mr. Einhorn asks. “Have you got the calling?” At this point Einhorn, a crippled property broker (“he had a brain and many enterprises, real directing power”), is still Augie's primary mentor. Einhorn knows how the world works; he knows about criminals and institutions. And in one of the book's most memorable speeches he lets Augie have it. One hardly needs to say that Bellow has an exquisite ear, precise and delighted in its registers: Guillaume, for example, the dog handler who has become overreliant on his hypodermic (“Thees jag-off is goin' to get it!”); or Happy Kellerman, Simon's much-abused coal-yard manager (“I never took no shit in bigger concerns”); or Anna Coblin, Mama's cousin (“Owgie, the telephone ringt. Hear!”). Naturally, Bellow can do all this. But from time to time he will also commandeer a character's speech for his own ends, keeping to the broad modulations of the voice while giving them a shove upward, hierarchically, toward the grand style. Seasoned Bellovians have learned to accept this as a matter of convention. We still hear Einhorn, but it is an Einhorn pervaded by his creator.

Don't be a sap, Augie, and fall into the first trap life digs for you. Young fellows brought up in bad luck, like you, are naturals to keep the jails filled—the reformatories, all the institutions. What the state orders bread and beans long in advance for. It knows there's an element that can be depended on to come behind bars to eat it. Or it knows how much broken rock for macadam it can expect, and whom it can count on to break it. … It's practically determined. And if you're going to let it be determined for you too, you're a sucker. Just what's predicted. Those sad and tragic things are waiting to take you in—the clinks and clinics and soup lines know who's the natural to be beat up and squashed, made old, pooped, farted away, no-purposed away. If it should happen to you, who'd be surprised? You're a set-up for it.

Nevertheless, as the novel nears the end of its second act, Augie continues to feel the urge to bottom out. At least the bottom is solid, and there's no farther to fall—and nothing else in his life seems solid. Soon after Einhorn's speech Augie goes on another incautious jaunt (in a hot car) with the same hustler (Joe Gorman, the housebreaker) out Toledo way. Augie escapes the state troopers but gets incarcerated on another charge, in Detroit.

“Lock 'em all up.”

We had to empty our pockets; they were after knives and matches and such objects of harm. But for me that wasn't what it was for, but to have the bigger existence taking charge of your small things, and making you learn forfeits as a sign that you aren't any more your own man, in the street, with the contents of your pockets your own business: that was the purpose of it.

Augie's durance, though, on his detour in the Midwest, unmoored from Chicago, is internal and spiritual. Here for the first time he sees human misery stretched across a natural landscape: war veterans, the unemployed bums haunting the rail tracks (they “made a ragged line, like a section gang that draws aside at night back of the flares as a train comes through, only much more numerous”) and sleeping in heaps on the floors of disused boxcars.

It was no time to be awake, or half awake, with the groaning and sick coughing, the grumbles and gases of bad food, the rustling in paper and straw like sighs or the breath of dissatisfaction. … A bad night—the rain rattling hard first on one side and then on the other like someone nailing down a case, or a coop of birds, and my feelings were big, sad, comfortless, of a thinking animal, my heart acting like an orb filled too big for my chest

—“not from revulsion,” Augie adds, “which I have to say I didn't feel.” And we believe him. Passively, directionlessly, Augie is visiting the dark and bestial regions occupied by his mother and younger brother—alike incapable of “work of mind.” Some pages earlier, after an extreme humiliation, Augie has said,

I felt I had got trampled all over my body by a thing some way connected by weight with my mother and my brother George, who perhaps this very minute was working on a broom, or putting it down to shamble in to supper; or with Grandma Lausch in the Nelson Home—somehow as though run over by the beast that kept them steady company and that I thought I was safely away from.

And by the time Augie limps back to Chicago, his family is gone. Simon has taken off, in obscure disgrace; Mama has been farmed out; and Grandma Lausch (“My grates couldn't hold it. I shed tears with my sleeve over my eyes”) is dead. Childhood—Act One—ended with the house getting

darker, smaller; once shiny and venerated things losing their attraction and richness and importance. Tin showed, cracks, black spots where enamel was hit off, threadbarer, design scuffed out of the center of the rug, all the glamour, lacquer, massiveness, florescence, wiped out.

The second act—youth—ends when there is nothing to go back to, because the home is no longer a place.

“Georgie Mahchy, Augie, Simey / Winnie Mahchy, evwy, evwy love Mama.”

So Georgie used to sing, on the novel's opening page. And it wasn't quite true. Winnie, Grandma Lausch's poodle (“a pursy old overfed dog”), didn't love Mama; and it remains painfully questionable whether Simon ever loved anybody. Georgie might have amended his song so that it concluded “evwy evwy Augie love.” Simon tells Augie, with full Chicagoan contempt, “You can't hold your load of love, can you!” And it's true. Tallish, dark, flushed, “rosy,” with “high hair,” always “vague” but always “stubborn,” Augie is unembarrassably amorous. When it comes to love, Augie just refuses to get real.

This marks him out, locally, as an effeminate anachronism—as does his goodness. “You don't keep up with the times. You're going against history,” Manny Padilla says. “The big investigation today is into how bad a guy can be, not how good he can be.” Generally in literature goodness has always been bad news. As Montherlant said, happiness—the positive value—“writes white.” Only Tolstoy, perhaps, made happiness swing on the page. And goodness writes purple. We'll never know how Russian novelists would have done modern goodness. In his Russian novels, as opposed to his American novels, Nabokov's goodies exude an aristocratic triumphalism (it's his one dud note), striding, blaring, munching, guffawing. But Bellow is a Russian too, as well as an American; and he makes goodness swing. Of course, Augie is an anachronism. Empathetic on a broad scale, he remains unalienated. His sufferings are reactive rather than existential. He is not a discontent: civilization, if we could get any, would suit him fine. He believes in the soul, and in human perfectibility. For the hero of a mid-twentieth-century novel, Augie is anomalously allegro; he is daringly, scandalously spry.

With women Augie displays an almost satirical susceptibility. First love, or first yearning, smites him as a high school sophomore.

I took sick with love, with classic symptoms of choked appetite and utter absorption, hankering, great refinements of respect in looks. … with a miserable counterfeit of merely passing, secretly pumped with raptures and streaming painfully. I clumped by. … I didn't stop this sadhearted, worshipful blundering around or standing like painted wood across the street from the tailor shop in the bluey afternoon. Her scraggy father labored with his needle, bent over, and presumably thinking nothing of his appearance to the street in the lighted glass; her chicken-thin little sister in black gym bloomers cut paper with the big shears.

Augie never addresses a word to Hilda Novinson, the tailor's daughter. But he gets a little bit further with his next love object, Esther Fenchel. At this point Augie is under the tutelage of wealthy Mrs. Renling, togged up in “dude-ranch” style and holidaying in a fancy hotel on Lake Michigan. In the meantime he has become acquainted with “the sexual sting” (and will soon be noticing, for instance, that Guillaume's girlfriend is “a great work of ripple-assed luxury with an immense mozzarella bust”). Nevertheless, Augie continues to love Esther from afar, and in the high style: “the world never had better color, to say it exactly as it strikes me, or finer and more reasonable articulation. Nor ever gave me better trouble. I felt I was in the real and the true. …” One night Augie glimpses Esther alone in the music room; “troubled and rocky,” he approaches her, saying,

“Miss Fenchel, I wonder if you would like to go with me some evening to the House of David.” Astonished, she looked up from the music. “They have dancing every night.”

I saw nothing but failure, from the first word out, and felt smitten, pounded from all sides.

“With you? I should say not. I certainly won't.”

The blood came down out of my head, neck, shoulders, and I fainted dead away.

As always, Augie is surrounded by exemplars and counterexemplars, showing him what to do about love and what not to do about it, in pre-war Chicago. First there is the conventional road, brutally described by Mrs. Renling and duly followed by Augie's old friend Jimmy Klein—and by tens of millions of others. This is the arrangement whereby loss of virginity coincides with unwanted pregnancy and unwanted marriage: marriage as an institution, and nothing more. Alternatively there is the bohemian path (in outline: illegal abortion, puerperal fever, septicemia) followed by Augie's fellow boarder, Mimi Villars. “Women really are no good, Augie,” she warns him. “They're no fucking good.” “They want a man in the house,” Mimi says. “Just there, in the house. Sitting in his chair.” Augie demurs, and then beautifully reflects,

I wasn't enough of an enemy of such things but smiled at such ruining wives too for their female softnesses. I was too indulgent about them, about the beds that would be first stale and then poisonous because their manageresses' thoughts were on the conquering power of chenille and dimity and the suffocation of light by curtains, and the bourgeois ambering of adventuring man in parlor upholstery. These things not appearing so threatening to me as they ought to appear, I was … a fool to [Mimi], one who also could be stuck, leg-bent, in that white spiders' secretion and paralyzed inside women's edifices of safety.

There is another way: Simon's way. “I am an American,” Augie says at the very outset. But he is not as American as Simon: “I want money, and I mean want; and I can handle it. Those are my assets.” Later, when Einhorn is giving Augie the lowdown on labor unions, he pronounces, with superb cynicism, “One more big organization. A big organization makes dough or it doesn't last. If it makes dough it's for dough.” Meaning on dough's side: pro-dough. Simon, quintessentially, is pro-dough. And this enables him to free his head of all distractions.

He enters an arranged marriage with a girl he has never seen, Charlotte Magnus, a scion of a big-boned kindred of Chicago merchants and burghers, themselves an institution, close-knit Netherlandish folk: Simon's patrons or backers. Their world is summoned in terms of furniture and textures, the “carpeted peace and brown-gravy velour” of the vast apartments, the “mobile heraldry” of their cars rushing on soft tires “toward the floating balls and moons” of the great hotels and their “Jupiter's heaviness and restless marble detail, seeking to be more and more, introducing another pot too huge for flowers, another carved figure, another white work of iron.” At the Magnuses', at night, the “riches-cluttered hall” is “partly inventoried” by the moonlight. Watching Charlotte preparing for her nuptials, Augie observes:

Neither her ladies' trimming and gew-gawing, the detail of her tailored person, nor the decorating of the flat when they furnished one … was of real consequence. But in what related to the bank, the stock, the taxes, head approached to head discussing these, the great clear and critical calculations and confidences made in the key to which real dominion was set, that was what wedlock really rested on.

The deal here—and it is a deal—turns out to be unambiguously Faustian. Although the Magnuses are prepared to stake him, Simon has to deliver on his promised ability to make a rich man of himself, worthy to join the community of American money.

In spring he leased a yard, at the end of the coal season. It had no overhead track, only a long spur of siding, and the first rains made a marsh of the whole place. … I was spending a good amount of time at the office; for when [Simon] grabbed my wrist and told me, almost drunkenly, with the grime and chapping of the mouth that comes of long nervous talking, saying low, huskily, viciously, “There's got to be somebody here I can trust. Got to be!” I couldn't refuse.

In the brilliant—and crucial—pages that follow, the coal yard becomes a figure for Simon's marriage and Simon's life.

Over the way was a stockyards siding, dusty animals bawling in the waiting cars, putting red muzzles to the slats; truck wheels sucked through the melting tar, the coal split and tarnished on the piles, the burdocks died on the stalk. There were rats in a corner of the yard who did not stir or go away for anyone, whole families, nursing, creeping, feeding there.

A lushed-up dealer named Guzynski tore onto the scale out of the slushy yard with white steam gushing from his busted radiator. … I told a hiker to clear the scale, but Guzynski was standing over his coal with a shovel and swung on him when he came near. Happy Kellerman was phoning for a squad car when Simon arrived. … in the narrow space between the truck and the office wall, Simon caught him had him by the throat, and hit him in the face with the side of the gun. This happened right below Happy and me, we were standing at the scale window, and we saw Guzynski, trapped, square teeth and hideous eyes, foul blue, and his hands hooked, not daring to snatch the gun with which Simon hit him again. He laid open Guzynski's cheek. My heart went back on me when the cuts were torn, and I thought, Does it make him think he knows what he's doing if the guy bleeds?

The misery of his look at this black Sargasso of a yard in its summer stagnation and stifling would sometimes make my blood crawl in me with horror. … Simon's patience and swallowing were worse to me than his wrath or flamboyance—that shabby compulsory physical patience. Another such hard thing was his speaking low and with an air of difficult endurance to Charlotte on the telephone and answering her questions with subdued repetitiousness, near the surrender point.

It is as if all the institutional weights and fetters, the gravity of the large agencies and big concerns, are pressing in on Simon; and Augie, who has swung his life onto his big brother's parallel track (he even has a stern Magnus daughter to court), must suffer this pressure vicariously, fraternally, but with utterly unwelcome clarity. The novel's opening page bears a famous line about suppression: “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.” And we have now reached the place where that sentence was pointing. Much later, after Augie has broken clear from Chicago, he returns to the city with a disinfected eye, and he can see this suppression daubed all over the landscape like paint.

Well, here it was again, westward from this window, the gray snarled city with the hard black straps of rails, enormous industry cooking and its vapor shuddering to the air, the climb and fall of its stages in construction or demolition like mesas, and on these the different powers and sub-powers crouched and watched like sphinxes. Terrible dumbness covered it, like a judgment that would never find its word.

But now the third-act climax is approaching. From this deep entanglement, from this junction of bad roads (Simon; engagement to the Magnus girl and the Magnus money; love and what to do about it), Augie must absent himself. And he escapes the only way he ever escapes anything: through inadvertency. New Year's Eve is approaching. Neglecting his festive duties as a squire to the Magnuses, Augie accompanies Mimi Villars to a back-street abortionist. This loyal and innocent deed is discovered and misinterpreted, spelling the end of his apprenticeship at the feet of American money. The moment is signaled by another prose epiphany, in a hospital (the penultimate institution), where Augie has taken the ailing Mimi. Here we come to understand all that Augie is not ready for.

I passed through to another division where the labor rooms were, separate cubicles, and in them saw women struggling, outlandish pain and huge-bellied distortion, one powerful face that bore down into its creases and issued a voice great and songlike in which she cursed her husband obscenely. … And just then, in the elevator shaft nearby, there were screams. I stopped and waited for the rising light I saw coming steadily through the glass panels. The door opened; a woman sat before me in a wheel chair, and in her lap, just born in a cab or paddy wagon or in the lobby of the hospital, covered with blood and screaming so you could see sinews, square of chest and shoulders from the strain, this bald kid, red and covering her with the red. She too, with lost nerve, was sobbing, each hand squeezing up on itself, eyes wildly frightened; and she and the baby appeared like enemies forced to have each other. …

“What are you doing here?” said the nurse with angry looks. I had no right to be there.

A sonnet can be perfect, a short story pretty well unimprovable, a novella nearly flawless, a novel just a few blemishes away from its platonic ideal. But the art of the long novel is an inexact art. A long novel, at its conception, bids farewell to exactitude, and to other constraints. Now something strange, something passing strange, happens to The Adventures of Augie March as it enters its fourth act. At the end of Chapter Thirteen, Augie is very much where we expect him to be: hiding out in a cinema on Madison Street, Chicago, after a union bust-up in the linen room of the Northumberland Hotel. Some twenty pages later he is in another cinema, in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, with a full-grown eagle on his arm. What has happened in the interim? The answer is Thea Fenchel (the older sister of Esther, back at the Lake Michigan resort). Augie March, and Augie March, have been swept off their feet.

Thea is both lover and mentor, perhaps an untenable combination. Augie has grown used to eccentrics by now, as has the reader; but Thea, a wealthy and resolute young woman, is eccentric simply because she wants to be—not forced into a weird shape by heredity or personal history or blind circumstance. In any event, tricked out in a new uniform, Augie escorts Thea south. Their plan is to buy an eagle, which they will then train to hunt giant iguanas, “these huge furious lizards, mesozoic holdouts in the mountains south of Mexico City.” And we follow them, eagerly but dazedly, over the Rio Grande, through the smells and shapes and the aromatic heat, and through the fluctuations of their anxious, lopsided, intensely realized passion. And the eagle?

Before setting out from Chicago, Augie pays a visit to the zoo—to get the general idea.

[The eagle] perched on a trunk inside a cage forty feet high and conical like the cage of a parlor parrot, in its smoke and sun colors dipped somewhat with green, and its biped stance and Turkish or Janissary pants of feathers—the pressed-down head, the killing eye, the deep life of its feathers. Oy!

Up close, with their own eagle (Caligula), Augie finds that “this open shadow would shut out your heart with its smell and power—the Etna feathers and clasped beak opening,” the “almost inaudible whiff of his spread wings” and “the fan of the pinions with hidden rust and angel-of-death armpit.”

He was, however, powerfully handsome, with his onward-turned head and buff and white feathers among the darker, his eyes that were gruesome jewels and meant nothing in their little lines but cruelty, and that he was here for his own need; he was entirely a manifesto of that. … trees, bushes, stones, as explicit as glare and the spice of that heat could make them. The giant bird, when Thea brought him out, seemed to shoulder it with a kind of rise of sensuality.

Caligula is one of the most lavishly vivid animals in all literature (more lavish, even, than the lion in Henderson the Rain King). But for all this you have to share Augie's bafflement, and feel partly second-guessed, when he asks himself, “What did there have to be an eagle for?” You know the novel is in trouble here because you keep seeking refuge in—of all things—literary criticism. Is the eagle (águila) Augie, or what remains of his beast nature? Is the eagle money, as the twenty-five-cent coin still declares it is? Is the (American) eagle simply America? But Augie March isn't a meaning novel: it is a gut novel. It depends not on equivalences but on the free flow of voice and feeling.

Caligula carries you, magically; it is only when he is gone (and Thea is gone, and love has failed) that you see the violence he has done to the novel's unities. After all, it wouldn't be right if the Great American Novel didn't have something wrong with it. “You're not special,” Thea tells Augie, in parting. “You're like everybody else.” And what the novel now charts is Augie's drift into the ordinary. After the fever and madness of Mexico, he is re-embraced by somber Chicago, failed in love, his youth evaporating, his youthful illusions absenting themselves from his thoughts. Poor Augie babbles about his dreams (sad dreams, of disappointment and deformity) and nurses hopeless visions of reunion with idiot Georgie and blind Mama, in a little house in the country, with children and animals all around. These ordinary sadnesses are perhaps his birthright. It may be that Augie was on to something inescapable when he stared at the sky on his way south to Mexico.

For should I look into any air, I could recall the bees and gnats of dust in the heavily divided heat of a street of El pillars—such as Lake Street, where the junk and old bottleyards are—like a terribly conceived church of madmen, and its stations, endless, where worshippers crawl their carts of rags and bones. And sometimes misery came over me to feel that I myself was the creation of such places.

The novel regathers itself very powerfully toward its close. When we last see him, Augie is established in the exhausted, yawning, pinch-yourself unreality of postwar Europe. He is an illicit trader (“There was this Florentine uncle of a Rome bigshot I had to pay off, and he was one of those civilized personalities with about five motives to my one”), and he has an unreliable wife, Stella (perhaps a “Cressida type,” “a double lifer”). He can declare himself free of all influences, all Machiavellis (“I took an oath of unsusceptibility”), before adding, with comic prescience, “Brother! You never are through, you just think you are!” Sure enough, Simon—tormentor, anti-mentor, hugely loved, hugely pitied—lends his shattered presence to the gradual and reluctant conclusion. We are left, finally, with images of toil and isolation. But creative labor, and creative loneliness. Augie has fallen into the habit of going to a café every afternoon, “where I sat at a table and declared that I was an American, Chicago born, and all these other events and notions.” So he is preparing himself to write—or just to imagine—his story.

All the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you rage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.

Attentive readers will, I hope, have noticed that this is an extraordinarily written novel. There are mannerisms or tics in the way the words squirm up against each other. The compounds (“worry-wounded,” “lair-hidden,” “bloody-rinded,” “pimple-insolence,” “gum-chew innocence”) in Bellow's heavily sprung rhythms sometimes career into train-wreck compression: Trafton's gym, with its “liniment-groggy, flickety-rope-time, tin-locker-clashing, Loop-darkened rooms.” There are the verb couplings: trams “lumbered and clanged,” billiard balls “kissing and bounding,” traffic “dived and quivered,” cars “snoring and trembling” or “fluddering and shimmering.” It is a style that loves and embraces awkwardness, spurning elegance as a false lead, words tumbling and rattling together in the order they choose: “glittering his teeth and hungry,” “try out what of human you can live with,” “the long impulse from well out in ocean bobs the rotten oranges,” “a flatfooted, in gym shoes, pug-nosed old woman,” “[he] sobbed in the brakes of, he thought, most solitude,” “I hoped there'd something show on the horizon,” “I could not find myself in love without it should have some peculiarity,” “hypocritic,” “honestest,” “ancientest,” “his brittle neck would be broke,” “waked-up despair,” “loud-played love music.” Why is “loud-played” music, in a dime store, so much better than “loud”? Because it suggests willfulness, vulgarity, and youth, whereas “loud” is just loud. Augie March isn't written in English; its job is to make you feel how beautiful American is, with its jazzy verbs: “It sent my blood happy,” “to close a deal,” “to run [a nickel] into a fortune,” “we must have been making twelve knots,” “cover the house” (get around it), “beat a check” (leave without paying it), “to make time with Mimi” (seduce), “This is where I shake you, Augie” (reject). Never mind the p's and q's of fine prose. Whatever works!

Style, of course, is not something grappled to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception. We are fond of separating style and content (for the purposes of analysis, and so on), but they aren't separable: they come from the same place. And style is morality. Style judges. No other writer and no other novel make you feel surer about this. It is as if Bellow were turning himself inside out and letting the observable world poke and prod at him nerve by nerve. Things are not merely described but registered, measured, and assessed for the weight with which they bear on your soul.

The river:

At last [Simon] answered me coldly, with a cold lick of fire in his eyes, on the stationary wintriness of the black steel harness of the bridge over the dragging unnameable mixture of the river flowing backwards with its waste.

The street guy Dingbat:

He was never anything but through and through earnest when the subject was loyalty or honor; his bony dukes were ready and his Cuban heels dug down sharply; his furrowed chin was seeking its fighting position on the shoulder of his starched shirt. Then he was prepared to go into his stamping dance and start slugging.

Mimi Villars, on the telephone:

“You'll never live to hear me beg for anything,” were Mimi's last words to Frazer, and when she slammed phone and hook together with cruelty it was as a musician might shut the piano after he had finished storming chords of mightiest difficulty without a single flinch or error.

The hospital:

Shruggers, hobblers, truss and harness wearers, crutch-dancers, wall inspectors, wheel-chair people in bandage helmets, wound smells and drug flowers blossoming from gauze, from colorful horrors and out of the deep sinks.

The cop shop:

And as the mis-minted and wrong-struck figures and faces stooped, shambled, strode, gazed, dreaded, surrendered, didn't care … you wondered that all was stuff that was born human and shaped human. … And don't forget the dirt-hardness, the dough fats and raw meats, of those on the official side.

The Chicago roofscape:

In its repetition it exhausted your imagination of details and units, more units than the cells of the brain and the bricks of Babel. The Ezekiel caldron of wrath, stoked with bones. A mysterious tremor, dust, vapor, emanation of stupendous effort traveled with the air, over me on top of the great establishment, so full as it was, and over the clinics, clinks, factories, flophouses, morgue, skid row.

The sea:

In beauty or doom colors, according to what was in your heart, the sea and skies made their cycles of day and night, the jeweled water gadding universally, the night-glittering fury setting in. …

Meanwhile the boat sauntered through glassy stabs of light and whee-whocked on the steep drink.

Augie March, finally, is the Great American Novel because of its fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity. In these pages the highest and the lowest mingle and hobnob in the vast democracy of Bellow's prose. Everything is in here, the crushed and the exalted and all the notches in between, from the kitchen stiff—

The angry skin of his dish-plunging arms and his twist horse-gauntness, long teeth and spread liquidness of eyes in the starry alley evening. … Under the fragile shell of his skull he leakily was reasoning

—to the American eagle. When an eagle flies, it isn't a matter of “the simple mechanics of any little bird that went and landed as impulse tickled him, but a task of massive administration.” This is Caligula, taking to “the high vibrations of blue.” And this is Saul Bellow, at thirty-eight, over and above the eagle—not an individual but a messenger:

Anyway, it was glorious how he would mount away high and seem to sit up there, really as if over fires of atmosphere, as if he was governing from up there. If his motive was rapaciousness and everything based on the act of murder, he also had a nature that felt the triumph of beating his way up to the highest air to which flesh and bone could rise. And doing it by will, not as other forms of life were at that altitude, the spores and parachute seeds who weren't there as individual but messengers of species.