A Fugitive Style: The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King

Abstract

Although The Adventures of Augie March (1953) was highly praised by the majority of contemporary reviewers, succeeding generations of critics have been less impassioned in their estimations of its worth. Though literary historians can continue to find a convenient niche for it as a work of protest against the tranquillised 1950s, an activist novel in Eisenhower’s decade of inertia, it is more properly seen as a work that conceals its protagonist’s existential despair beneath a rhetoric of affirmation and a posture of hope. Still, as one more recent critic put it, ‘despite its initial success, the novel has not worn well’,¹ and many critics now see it as at most a daring innovation on the part of a writer indulging himself stylistically at the expense of his readers’ patience and his character’s plausibility. Bellow’s aim may well have been to give, through a stylistic laissez-allez, the necessary sense of swiftness and truth, spontaneity and artlessness which might have made his picaro’s adventures read like the very stuff of lived experience. But what he achieved was a great deal less, and many readers may well agree that in the end Bellow trades unjustifiably on their tolerance.