swallow it. You can’t get enough. And when another woman runs after you, you’ll go with her. You’re so happy when somebody begs you to oblige. You can’t stand up under flattery.”

A cripple with an enduring entrepreneurial spirit, Einhorn serves as a father-figure and guide for Augie. Augie works as his personal assistant. Einhorn's real son, Arthur, aspires to be a poet. I don’t want to say "thinking person" or "thinking human" or "thinking human being". These phrases are too ponderous and artificial.A relation of the Magnuses who has known Simon and Augie since childhood, Kelly Weintraub sabotages Augie's reputation by spreading the news about Augie and Mimi Villars. Happy Kellerman The purer version of her older sister Thea, Esther Fenchel refuses to date Augie, believing that he is in fact Mrs. Renling's gigolo. She later marries a wealthy lawyer in Washington, DC. Thea

Rebecca's sympathetic cousin, Anna Coblin, is an immense woman who "adopts" Augie for a summer. Augie lives with the Coblins, helping with the newspaper route and Five Properties' dairy deliveries. Anna's son, Howard, has run away to join the military, and her daughter, Freidl (who she hopes Augie will one day marry), is a stutterer. Five PropertiesEsther's more passionate older sister, Thea Fenchel falls in love with Augie in Benton Harbor. She leaves him a note claiming that he will see her again one day. Later, she appears in Chicago and asks Augie to accompany her to Mexico, where she plans to file for a divorce. She also plans to train bald eagles to hunt lizards. Augie becomes increasingly disturbed by Thea's preoccupation with hunting, and ultimately cheats on her with another woman. Later in the book, Augie receives a letter from Thea stating that she has married an Air Force captain. Cissy Flexner The book ends with Augie living in France with Stella. She is trying to make a go of being an actress, and Augie is involved in some shady dealings. I can sense that Augie is looking towards the horizon, dreaming about the experiences and adventures that await him just over the curve of the earth. Poor Augie. He's got good looks and smarts, but he's about as dependable as scaffolding held together by Elmer's glue; not the guy on whose shoulders you'd want to place the fate of the galaxy. Or the earth. Or your business.

In early life, Bellow was both on the 'left' and at an angle to it, by way of a youthful Trotskyism and a membership in the Partisan Review crowd. As he became less idealistic in one way - satirising his old PR pal Delmore Schwartz in Humboldt's Gift and eventually honouring his newer friend Allan Bloom in Ravelstein - it was still nobility he searched for. Albert Corde in The Dean's December may have to deal with the scum of Chicago, and his wife may have to suffer from the vulgar, fraudulent dictatorship of her native Romania, but she can still book time at a vast telescope and spend it gazing at the stars. If you're anything like Augie March, you're probably wondering what use this story has to you. An episodic novel set around the time of the Great Depression might make for an interesting read, but what relevance does it have today?Throughout the novel Augie is encouraged to go to University and does frequently consider it, usually when events have conspired against him. Going to school is frankly just too rigid a system for him. It is why he can’t hold down a regular job and why he is attracted to skilless jobs as long as he has more freedom of movement. He starts working for a man he would admire for the rest of his life, named Einhorn, while still in high school. ”’What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn think? I’m not kidding when I enter Einhorn in this eminent list.” Einhorn is far from being on the up and up. He is a cripple who manages his affairs from a wheelchair but seems to be able to see the workings of the world very clearly, even if he isn’t able to see it for himself.

Readers of Augie March get a close look at how much the United States has changed since the early twentieth century and how much it has stayed the same. They'll see that the arguments we're having today on social media and cable news were had in college houses and poolrooms in Augie's time. The novel doesn't take any position on these issues, so don't worry—it never feels preachy. It's more like a set of postcards from the past that show how little the country has changed. The jury is still out on whether that's for better or worse. According to Bellow, his first two novels felt "cramped". Augie March, on the other hand, was something of the reverse; the material dictated the form, and, for this reason, critics have often complained about the novel's "shapelessness". The novel is fashioned in the picaresque style, with numerous episodes surrounding a likable rogue-character of low birth (the picaro). At the same time, the novel hovers precipitously close to the form of the bildungsroman, a novel which details a young man's ascent into maturity, usually in an autobiographical format. In contrast to the picaresque novel, the bildungsroman is structured around the development of the protagonist. Whether Augie actually matures is a subject of much debate, though Bellow clearly intended Augie's development to be the focal point of the novel: the book even opens with the assertion that "a man's character is his fate". Wikipedia has a great summary of this book. ”With an intricate plot and allusive style, Bellow explores contrasting themes of alienation and belonging, poverty and wealth, love and loss, with often comic undertones.” Because Augie is so free spirited, impossible to chain down in any profession or relationship, Bellow has an opportunity, through this character, to evaluate every nugget of human experience. Saul Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, and this book was mentioned as his greatest contribution to literature. Masterpiece? Of course, it is. The Judge couldn’t possibly be wrong.

Retailers:

Success lays its own traps for us. We find ourselves frog marched along until the next thing we know the whole world would think we were insane to want to be anything other than what we have become.