Title: The Adventures of Augie March
Rating: 4 Stars
The Adventures of Augie March usually makes the list of possible candidates for the twentieth century Great American Novel.
It’s easy to understand why. It’s a broad coming of age story. As I was reading it, I was reminded of everything from The History of Tom Jones to David Copperfield to Vanity Fair to even Candide.
Like Dickens, Augie March is populated with an army of characters, all full of life, usually extremely verbal, and finely drawn. They regularly disappear for long intervals, only to reappear in a dramatically different context, leaving you to think, yes, I’ve seen this character before, but where exactly?
Augie March is proudly born in Chicago, somewhere around the end of WWI. His father is completely out of the picture. It’s just him, his brother Simon, his mentally disabled brother Gregory, and their meek mother.
The novel describes Augie’s struggle to find his place in the world. One aspect to this struggle is that, for some reason, there is something about Augie that encourages wealthy and successful people to help him.
Sometimes it’s his brother Simon, who, through fits and starts himself, ultimately ends up marrying a wealthy heiress and becoming a successful businessman. When Augie crosses paths with Simon, Simon pretty much continually harangues him to apply himself and follow the same path that Simon did.
There is also Einhorn, the paralyzed son of a very successful businessman named The Commodore. The Commodore dies immediately before The Great Depression, nearly ruining Einhorn, but he does manage to land on his feet. At various times throughout the 1920s, Einhorn mentors Augie as Augie attends to Einhorn’s, at times, very personal needs.
Next come Mr and Mrs Renfort. The Renforts are successful owners of a sporting goods store. Augie makes a great impression upon them and becomes a successful saleman. Mrs Renfort becomes so enamored with Augie that she wishes to adopt him. Afraid of being suffocated by the pair, Augie flees.
Later is the Armenian Mintouchian. A wealthy lawyer that takes Augie under his wing, Augie ends up in business with him after WWII selling GI supplies to the desperately poor but rebuilding Germany.
When he’s not being taken under the wing by wealthy businessmen, it’s women that step in and take over. Thea Fenchel, who a young Augie barely takes note of, takes him aside one day, tells him that she loves him, and that they will end up together.
Years later, Thea hunts down Augie and they promptly do fall in love. Augie and Thea go down to Mexico to follow her dream of training a bald eagle to hunt like a falcon to catch large lizards. Ultimately, it all falls apart and Thea abandons him in Mexico. While in Mexico, Augie meets Stella, the woman, again, years later, that he reconnects with and ultimately marries. While he’s in Europe conducting his business, Stella is pursuing an acting career in Paris.
In contrast to all of the business men of action, the intellectual characters in the novel have a curious passivity, if not actual insanity. There is Arthur, the son of Einhorn, who stands to inherit all of Einhorn’s business, but is content to be a languishing poet. Later Augie works for Robey, an eccentric millionaire that claims to be wanting to write one of the great masterpieces of all time, but makes little progress on it and just wants to talk. There is also Basteshaw, a carpenter that ends up in a lifeboat alone with Augie after their ship is torpedoed in WWII. At first Basteshaw actually seems to be a brilliant biochemist that has discovered how to artificially replicate life in a laboratory. Within days, he has gone clearly mad and Augie has to tend to him as they await their rescue.
This is interesting because Augie himself appears to be trapped between the business and the intellectual world. He understands the need for money, appreciates luxury when he has it, but just seems to lose interest in any one career path. He also has a passion for learning. At times he takes courses at a university but never completes. Other times he saves up money to go back but never quite does. During down times, he finds himself spending hours reading the Harvard Classics (the famous five foot shelf), but again, allows himself to become distracted.
At the end of the day, it seems that Augie can’t make up his mind to pursue business, relationships, or intellectual pursuits. Therefore, the other major characters in his life, by and large, dictate his path. He just seems to passively go along with whoever he happens to be with. By always trying to fit in with other people’s schemes, that seems to allow him to defer him choosing his own path.
At some level, he recognizes this and seems to want to change and to choose his own way. However, at the end of the novel, he is still married to Stella and is in business with Mintouchian.
If I were to make a guess, at some point in the future, Augie’s marriage to Stella will fail and his business venture with Mintouchian will end. If so, he will simply just fall under the spell of another woman or another successful businessman and will passively move along in their slipstream.
That truly appears to be Augie’s destiny.
dorkenstein 