The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March


Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

The third Bellow book that I've read on the list after Herzog and Humboldt's Gift. Not your typical novel. We follow Augie March, a likable normal guy from Chicago, around from adventure to adventure which is all a grand buildup for, well, nothing. There is no grand finale here. What the reader gets is a lot like real life, no happily ever after, just onward to more challenges and opportunities.
Augie is born into a down on their luck Jewish family around 1920 in Chicago. Apparently the first paragraph is very famous for its declaration of Americaness, but I didn’t notice it the first time around. Augie seemed about as American as you can get, resourceful, immigrant family, good natured but makes some questionable choices.
Augie March is all about fate. Augie muses on it often. The characters he encounters, the trips he takes (smuggling immigrants in a stolen car, working at a pool hall, stealing books for profit, teaching an eagle to hunt, and excursion to Mexico, getting sunk by a Japanese ship in the Pacific) all seem to inflict themselves on Augie. He reacts to the different circumstances, but does he really have any agency over what his future will be?
Augie himself is an interesting character, streetwise but philosophical. He’s as good at hitching rides and avoiding the law as he is at opining on ancient Greeks. The book is more valuable, however, in its depiction of the Great Depression. Chicago is tough and gritty, filled with guys trying to make a buck whether it’s honest or not, and women who are tougher and more resilient than the men. There’s a gap between the rich and poor which Augie straddles precariously at times, at others he struggles to break through, and sometimes he revels in a Bohemian lifestyle.
I thought Herzog was a more impressive work by Bellow. It’s main character was more interesting. If I could change Augie (and yeah, I know Saul Bellow probably isn’t super pumped to have a hack edit his classic) I would have had Augie get in on the plan to protect Trotsky in Mexico. Bellow was scheduled to meet with the Russian leader the day he was assassinated, it would have been neat to see Augie deal with a big historic event, it also would have served as a climax and set up an extended denouement with WWII serving as closure of Augie’s wanderings and an entrance into the next phase of his life. Maybe that’s the point though. We don’t live our lives like a novel. If we succeed or fail we don’t get a handy “The End” as the sun sets. We move on to the next thing, or fight off whatever fate has in store for us.

Rating 6/10: Loses steam after the Mexico trip. Great characters, great plot points, seemingly no story arc (but that’s probably the point).

A Room with a View

EM Forster (1879-1970)

Firstly, do you think there's another span in history where more stuff changed than 1879-1970?

I've tried to get into A Passage to India several times and never had much luck, so I was a little nervous when BJ Harrison announced he was doing a 10 part series reading A Room with a View on his awesome podcast. I was pleasantly surprised with how much I liked this short novel. The characters are lively and fun, and you can tell Forster is really smart without him beating you over the head with it.

Lucy Honeychurch is on vacation in Italy when she meets an odd father/son duo named Emerson. Dad is kind of an outside the system proto-hippy and his son George is kind of a down in the mouth philosophical dreamer. Lucy is probably 20, struggling to find her place in her stuffy Edwardian era social circles. Forster introduces us to a full cast of characters in Italy from the most embarrassing tourist to the most seasoned traveler who's still embarrassing because they think they're Italian.

The Emerson's are notable because they refuse to abide by social norms, they tell things like they are and don't sugarcoat anything. They become a curiosity but not someone that polite people want to be seen with. This awkwardness comes early when the Emerson's hear Lucy and her companion opine about having a better view from their hotel room. When the Emerson's offer to simply switch rooms with the ladies all sorts of social ramifications are set into motion. On a trip to the country the couple kiss and are caught in the act by Lucy's cousin. This act of impropriety ends part one.

Part two is back in England where Lucy is engaged to Cecil, who, to be frank, is kind of a dick. He talks down to women, is really boring, and won't play tennis. Another string of occurrences lead the Emerson's to town where George renews his courting. Lucy loves him, but he's not an acceptable match. She breaks it off with Cecil and decides to bolt for Greece before she meets one more time with Mr. Emerson who convinces her to get with George. They're married and hanging out in Italy, her family is mad but they'll get over it.

Two big themes in Room, adhering to society's expectations versus being free and the role of fate. The dichotomy between the Honeychurch's and the Emerson's is clear, societal rules or be free. Luckily Forster made the whole situation more nuanced than that. Because the Emerson's are so rigid in their screw the system attitudes they are almost as trapped as the Honeychurch's. Emerson and Lucy think about how fate plays into their lives. So many coincidences and long shots have to come through for them to be together. Lucy tries to avoid George even though she loves him, but he just keeps appearing.

Rating 6.5/10: It's a cool inspection of British customs in the early 1900s and the characters are interesting, but not much in the way of plot.

Little Dorrit

Charles Dickens

I'm back baby! Little Dorrit almost derailed me with its terribility, but I survived. This is Dickens, A Christmas Car, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities etc. etc., so we should be pretty safe picking up one of his books. Even Dickens worst, Bleak House, was endearing after a slow start. Well, Little Dorrit is a big letdown. Memorable characters are limited to Flora, the motormouthed ex-girlfriend of the bland and boring Clennam.

We start in prison in France, a moderately interesting scene with a man named Rigaud who allegedly killed his wife and has switched identities several times. Sounds pretty rad, right? So there's your villain. We ditch Rigaud for awhile before he returns with a nefarious plot, perhaps the worst thing a person can do, blackmail an old woman with a moderately embarrassing secret from 45 years ago. Oh the excitement.

Most critics would say the real villain in Little Dorrit is the debtors' prison and the lack of a social safety net. We find the title character and her father in Marshalsea Prison, they've been screwed over by Clennam's mom who's a real piece of work. The prison is a community unto itself with interesting social interactions and a hierarchy of leadership.

By the end of the book everyone is back to being poor and living in the prison. except for Mrs. Clennam because of bad investments. Normally I don't like to spoil the endings of the classics, but let's be honest, none of you are going to read Little Dorrit. I also want to review the end because it is outrageously stupid.

Rigaud blackmails old lady Clennam, she pretty much tells him to eff off, and, after sitting in a wheelchair in her house for 20 years she gets up, leaves the house and heads to Marshalsea to tell Little Dorrit she's sorry. This accomplished she heads home only to pass out in front of her house which promptly collapses, killing Rigaud. I'm not making that up, Charles Dickens actually wrote that climax. I have a feeling he was about 10 pints deep into the wassail.

The relationship between Little Dorrit and Clennam is also strange. Clannam is a 40ish business man who's sort of estranged from his mother. Little Dorrit takes care of her dad in the prison, she's 16. Clennam becomes her protector and they fall into tepid love with each other.

Rating 3/10: Boring, contrived, no characters worth caring about. This makes two Dickens books on the classics list that don't belong. Dorrit & Drood.

The Warden

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

The Warden is the first of six novels about the town of Barsetshire. Naturally, I read the second novel, Barcester Towers, first. No one should ever accuse me of being smart. BT was a few years ago but I remember liking it quite a bit, some biting satire and standout characters. Trollope is like a more personable Dickens with less eventful, if more realistic plots. He seems gregarious and friendly as a narrator than his more famous countryman.

The Warden details the controversy surrounding the right of the church to bestow 800 pounds to the warden of an old folks' home when the will it draws that right from explicitly states that money is to go to the old folks at Hiram's Hospital. The church is basically ripping the poor, infirm workers off and has been for years. Who's stuck in the middle but Septimus Harding (cool name) a kindly, meek, and benevolent man of the cloth. The problems start when an equally well meaning laymen, John Bold, decides to take up the cause of the poor guys. Things are complicated by three facts: 1) Bold is in love with Harding's daughter Eleanor and she loves him 2) The archbishop is a big blustery fellow by the name of Grantly who is vehemently against Bold and also married to Harding's other daughter 3) Septimus Harding has a conscience that won't let him overlook ripping off old guys.

The novel follows Harding's struggle with the lawsuit, his ideas about fairness to the inhabitants of Hiram's hospital and his loyalty to the church. He is devastated when a few editorials appear in the all powerful Jupiter newspaper blasting the warden for his greed. The editorials are really the last straw, they deeply affect Harding and he decides to head to London to confer with the church's lawyer, an action of betrayal to the archbishop. After the lawyer can't even begin to explain why the warden gets the 800 pounds a year Harding makes up his mind to retire from the position. And that's pretty much the whole book. Eleanor and Bold get married, the end. What we've got here is really the introduction to Barchester Towers, a much more nuanced and complicated tale. The nice thing about The Warden is that we get a look inside the mind of a very good man. Once the issue of fairness is brought up to Harding, Trollope shows the wheels moving in the old man's mind. The thought process that leads him to resign from the wardenship and take a ton less money is the center of the tale.

Rating 5/10: I liked The Warden, but it should have just been tacked onto Barchester Towers.

The Dreams in the Witch House

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

One of the shortest of the classics, you can find Witch House here. We meet poor Walter Gilman after he's already made a fatal mistake. A math major in college, he becomes obsessed with the tales of a witch who was executed 300 years ago in his town. This witch, Keziah Mason, bragged to the court that she had discovered a fourth dimension. Gilman decided, or was drawn, to move into Keziah's former garret room which was still extant.

The small room is plagued by rats and has two small enclosures that have long been inaccessible. Lovecraft guides us between Gilman's distressing days and his mindblowingly abstract and horrible dreams. Within the dreams Gilman alternates between seeing horrible apparitions of an old crone, a small human-like rat named Brown Jenkins, and a giant Black Man and some really trippy scenes where he is transcending time and space surrounded by space and odd shaped entities.

I don't want to give away the story save to say Gilman is pulled farther and farther into the insanity of the dreams until they cross over into his awake life. I do want to comment on the dreams. Lovecraft's dreamworld reads more like an analyzation of an LSD trip from the 60s. The division between the real and the dream world becomes smaller and smaller until they finally merge. Some creepy, mindbending stuff.

Rating 7/10: A lot packed into a short story. Need to get through more Lovecraft stories in this series before giving it a final rating.

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens

There is an awful lot of Charles Dickens on the Penguin list of classics, some of it not so great (Edwin Drood) some of it totally awesome (most everything else). Copperfield falls into the awesome category. It's a sweeping, semi-autobiographical novel full of memorable scenes and more memorable characters. The bad guys are really bad and the good guys are really good and there are even some people who occupy a nuanced, grey area.

This is Copperfield's book. He is writing it at a time after he has become an accomplished author looking back on how he got there. He has a unique voice, enthusiastic and emotional, that makes the book chug along even when it hits some slow spots.

The characters are what make Copperfield, otherwise it's a slightly overdramatic plot with criticisms of several of Britain's institutions. Uriah Heep, Mr. Micawber, Steerforth, Mr. Dick, Miss Dartle, Peggotty, Aunt Betsey, Dora and on and on. Heep is particularly noteworthy for his capability to be hated for his humbleness.

As for the plot we see David's whole life. He loses his secure place in society when his mother remarries and scrambles for everything he gets from there. There are many who help and hinder him on his path to adulthood. There are even a lot of twists and turns that I didn't see coming, The Tempest chapter is dramatic and touching, there might have been some tears shed in one of the death scenes as well.

Rating 9/10: High level Dickens. Touching, entertaining, funny, and memorable; this one deserves to be in the list.

Bleak House

Charles Dickens

A long, interminable, mindnumbingly infuriating, suicide-inducing court case screws up a family and leaves everyone's lives in ruin. That's pretty much Bleak House. The only good thing that happens for the first 4/5s of the book is the reunion of a minor character and his mother. Everything else is, well, bleak. Esther is the main character. She's the right hand lady of Ada. Ada and Richard are involved in the lawsuit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. They are introduced to each other and the suit by the benevolent John Jarndyce. John tries to shield them from the fools gold of a court victory. Guess how well that plan works.

Bad stuff starts happening after Richard and Ada fall in love. Richard is a slacker, Esther gets sick, some philanthropists are jerks, Richard obsesses about Jarndyce, a kid dies, Esther is disfigured because of her illness, not great times. There are some notable minor characters in the novel. The Mrs. Jellyby, who care more about saving Africa than her own family, Miss Flight who's attended Jarndyce sessions forever.

This thing really takes a long time to get its legs. Once it does, though, there's a lot of good stuff. Esther and her mom, Richard's descent into obsession, John and Esther's relationship, all interesting and the theme of the injustice of the justice system is everywhere.

Rating: 6/10 Too long, conflict and drama not all that dramatic.

Herzog

Saul Bellow (1915-1905)

Reading this book made me feel like I was back in grad school. There were times when I'd sit in a small classroom with seven or eight other students and a professor and feel profoundly dumb. I'm not talking about how I felt in math class where I didn't care whether I knew what was going on, I was legitimately interested in the subject matter and tried to understand it and still had no clue what other people were talking about. Saul Bellow's command of language and a turn of phrase is something at which to marvel. His knowledge base is vast. He delves into psychology, history, sociology, literature, all in telling the tale of Moses E. Herzog. The narrator is omniscient, but has the voice of someone who could have been friends with Moses or perhaps even Moses looking at his own life. Much of the story is told through Moses's letters that he writes to just about everyone but never sends.

We meet Moses after his second wife, Maddy, has left him for former friend Valentine Gersbach. Moses is an academic with lots of knowledge, a relatively impressive career but he's fallen on hard times. His letters touch on his personal relationships, the direction of the country and society as a whole and most notably his nostalgia for the his upbringing in Montreal and Chicago. It's a tribute to Bellow that there really isn't any action in the entire novel. Moses, in his darkest hour, a time where he finds clarity in his life, nearly rocks the boat, but he backs off. Most of what the reader gets is up in Moses's head. There are a ton of real show stopping lines, the kind of phrase that makes you think, "I could have never thought of that in 100 years."

RATING: 7.5/10 Not much action but lots of good writing.

The Way We Live Now

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

Financial crisis, celebrity maneuverings, wild parties, suspicious deaths: is it 2009? nope it's "The Way We Live Now," a book way ahead of its time. Does that make it great? no, not really. There are a bunch of characters, Melmotte, his wife and daughter, Lady Carbury, Felix Carbury, Hetta Carbury and on and on. None of these characters are very likable. Those who are wise seem to be conniving cheats, and those who are innocent seem to be naive and dumb. Melmotte plays the market and inflates stocks by his guile. The stodgy English gents don't perceive Melmotte's financial genius and anticipate huge gains no matter what the real situation is.

There are many interpersonal relationships, Hurtle/Montague etc. but this book is about society and the perception of wealth. When finances get screwed up everything goes wrong. A good book for out times, but not particularly entertaining.

Book Ratings: 5/10

Update

Just went through the list and I've read 161 of the more than 1400 Penguin Classics. I also have only reviewed about 40 of them. That's pretty lame of me. Granted I read many of the classics before I started this blog. Over the next week I'm going to pound out some reviews of stuff that I read a long time ago. They're going to be more my impressions of the works more than detailed summaries, but maybe that will be better.