The Victim and Augie March

By Robbie on April 8, 2009

Philip Roth has written about the magnificent throwing-overboard of harmony and order and beginner's-composition principles that went into the creation of "The Adventures of Augie March," Saul Bellow's third novel and the first to establish his style.  I've returned to this book after an unsatisfying books-on-cassette grapple many years back, and just on the heels of a first reading of "The Victim," Mr. Bellow's second book.  Both violated expectations.  "Augie" is like a city on paper, a manic hive of small characters, unruly movement, and sentences that snake around and recess and branch like back alleys.  Its self-assurance, as a book by and about Jews but free by design of any special pleading or social-problem solemnizing, published as it was back in the time of "Gentleman's Agreement," was fresh and brave, and remains so.  Its shortcoming, for me, is in what it throws overboard.  Inasmuch as that baggage includes the fantastic "The Victim" (disdained by its author as "my Ph.D."), let me be the man on deck shouting, "Not so fast!"

There are two victims in the story, Kirby Allbee and Asa Leventhal.  The first has been done out of his job -- which leads to the loss of his wife and a portion of his sanity -- by the second, or so the disenfranchised alcoholic claims.  Allbee's stalking of Leventhal and eventual usurpation of all his waking thoughts is the main concern of the story, but it's also peopled by a dozen other finely-drawn lesser characters, and at times is funny, often painterly. That is, the world and style of "Augie" do not by any means mark a total departure.  But the tautness of the earlier book is sacrificed at a cost.  The tightening of the screws around a sympathetic suffering human, all that authorial manipulation, or intelligent design, if you will -- deride it as beginner's composition tricks, but they worked to keep this reader in a contented spell, and waiting impatiently for the next long subway ride to return to the harassed Mr. Leventhal.

"Augie" is certainly a more effortful read.  I'm only a hundred pages in, but so far the action is unfolding not as it happens but is rather filtered through the recall of Augie. He's a character who we glean mostly through the quoted imprecations of others is a bit of a rascal and a shirker and even low-life, but is also, by some miracle so far unexplained, a ferocious polymath who can allude casually to Heraclitus and Talleyrand and string together beautiful and unlikely adjectives as though he were Saul Bellow. Because of the somewhat Dickens-like memory-voice -- a generalized historical indicative used instead of contemporarily unspooling action to move events ("I now began to spend full time with...," "we were getting too big for...," "she would show us how to...") -- the reader is at a helpless remove from the scenes depicted, never released fully from the narrator's mind; and as a result there is a certain deficit of tension of the kind that comes naturally from full absorption in the insecure present. This is a great mind, Bellow's/Augie's, no doubt about that, with an apparently congenital disability to be uninteresting or less than provocative on any detail of human beings and their intrigues, productions, habitats, grievances, and shenanigans. And what a maestro of the music of words -- that last sentence's list of nouns is so unworthy of the subject!

An almost incredible number of self-assured, innovative literary voices were crafted, against all the usual odds, in the time that Mr. Bellow lived.  But I am betting that the basic and now-unshiny mechanisms of the novel, as forged in the hundreds of years before him, will prevail, and that for this reason, Victim stock may rise as Augie's drops.