The Adventures of Augie March

Augie's own term for his defining trait, repeated throughout the book, is "the opposition": an instinctive resistance to being remade in the image of whoever currently has a use for him. Grandma Lausch's old-world scheming, the crippled real-estate operator William Einhorn's Machiavellian realism, Thea Fenchel's grand romantic project of training an eagle named Caligula to hunt lizards in Mexico — each relationship on offer is a ready-made identity, a "line" in Augie's word for it, and each time he drifts loose rather than commit, which Bellow frames as freedom rather than failure of nerve, whatever it costs him in stability.

Caligula the eagle, magnificently built for killing and repeatedly too frightened to do it, is a deliberate mirror for Augie himself: an instrument that won't perform the function everyone around him assumes it exists for, disappointing in turn every character who tries to make use of it. Chicago itself, rendered in torrential, clause-stacking sentences that pile detail on ethnicity on incident the way the city piles neighborhood on neighborhood, is as much the novel's subject as its method — Bellow's famous opening declaration, "I am an American, Chicago born," announces a prose style built for abundance rather than the pruned, controlled short-story sentence that dominated the era's fiction.

Set against Augie's drift is his brother Simon, who takes the opposite path with total conviction, marrying into wealth and hardening himself into a ruthless operator — the life Augie is offered repeatedly and refuses each time. The novel isn't building toward Augie eventually choosing one of these available lines; "the opposition" is the plot, not an obstacle to it, which is why the book can range across jobs, cities, and mentors for five hundred pages without ever feeling like it's stalling.

Bellow wrote the novel fast and loose after two tightly controlled early books, Dangling Man and The Victim, deliberately reacting against the era's dominant mode: the pruned, Flaubertian short story built around a single restrained epiphany. The result licensed a generation of American novelists — Roth and Updike among them, by their own accounts — to write with comparable appetite, and the book won the National Book Award in 1954 as the loud, digressive rebuttal to postwar fiction's good manners.