Despite its initial success, [The Adventures of Augie March] has not worn well…. [Difficult] questions continue to disrupt considerations of the novel. Bellow's strategy … is a reckless one, to fling an individual out across the surface of a very large work. Any such book depends for its success on the resiliency of that individual, on his ability to become, like a new coat, comfortable with time. There is also a problem of focus, for Bellow parades American types and deformities past the reader in considerable number, and we often have to peer over their heads to get a glimpse of Augie. As if to complicate matters, we must continually adjust our register to accommodate the two Augie Marchs, narrator and actor, an adjustment which is not always easy. And after we have resolved these problems, how are we to take this expatriate American, disenchanted Chicagoan, non-Jewish Jew, and unadventurous adventurer? Is he, unlike Bellow's earlier heroes, a proof that modern society can bring to maturity a man who affirms—by his words and his presence—the brutish, glorious, squalid, monumental, and petty life of men? Or is he an example of our society's ability to make all motion circular, to reduce men to demented jabbering in the face of its alternating demands and rejections? Finally, and more important for the reader approaching the book for the first time, does the style of Augie's reminiscences bear enduring? The pitch of the writing here is more extreme than anything else Bellow has attempted in his career. Augie's prose is either daringly successful or very aggravating, and more than one reader has put the novel aside because he could not tolerate its surface.
Augie tells us at the first that "a man's character is his fate,"… and if this is true, we need to know who and what Augie March is. He introduces himself with a naive bluster which is neither informative nor encouraging, and the initial words, "an American, Chicago born," are most helpful to the hunter of allegories. We find out a great many irrelevancies in the next pages (to be exact, in the first half of the book), but we still do not know the answer to this question…. Augie, a free soul, will not be defined by neighborhood. Neither can we place him by occupation…. Throughout, rich women are constantly present, and only his particular sense of himself saves Augie from becoming a gigolo. No, we will not find him out there.
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