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...