Saul Bellow THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH

Jarmusch, Amis, & Hitchens has been for twenty-five years the firm on which I steadily rely to defend myself against the institutional morals offenses and crimes against nature that scour my ship of speed and grace with vicious barnacles, so that I have to wonder why the elder two principals pressed themselves to an uncharacteristic declamation christening Bellow’s book the Great American Novel, a overwrought attribution without which I could have done. The unimpeachable lyric greatness of THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH cannot be absolute though, because its howlers and breaches roil the still waters. The unimpeachable lyric greatness of THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH does not contravene one of my favorite opinionated assumptions, that like remarks, “invention” is not literature. Novels are authors, and novelists are (only) conning when they place an awful rut in the dark mudded road bearing down upon which a carriage carrying a fleeing bride portentously hurtles. Published versions of this number in the millions-upon-millions, obscuring the sun, and in some novels, Vienna sausages in their can convey the chance artfulness has of setting the hot dogs rolling down hillsides, pell-mell, screaming with delight at (imagine!) a Beethoven Tenth Symphony. Cat runs away.
Bellow’s growlers and imperfect structure have no analogue in the pristine latter novels of Henry James, which admit no brute awakening from the granite-hard dream of literature.
Bellow’s pastiches, ornamentations, and vignettes elude the pine telegraph poles from which their progress must depend; his tone poems and impressionistic pastel clouds pair a reader with zephyrs and carousels; the human heart is unfurled and delaminated, warm flames of flickering fires rest the sentiments in contented apposition. Augie’s brother Simon is hanged from trees, and holds up signs; with the skill of a burglar he fashions himself a veterinarian and rids Chicago of its plaguing cats; the sordid vanities harked upon our betters thread through his apostles in Cleveland; Augie is rent and gouged, flensed and fellated by rapacious birds; yon bistro reserves the table ronde for his streams of workers exiting cold factories where no mirths form. An electric train anticipates the wild colors that develop out of watching a hundred shades of grey emerge from the ablurring house and factory structures along the way. In the cemetery jesters and fools spangle tombstones with kites and kite tails and kite strings. Remove to Mexican arroyos or even Callisto? Nothing simpler. I had a drug store send her up some breakfast. The poles moor clouds of grace an author has confected, it is true. But that way puppetry lay, as well as the more basic equations of construction.