It took me forever to read this book and I'm not exactly sure why. It is not a bad book and there are parts that are compelling, but once you get through them you can let it sit for days and days and not really care too much what is going to happen next. Not a rousing endorsement of the book itself, but there are interesting pieces of it. It tells the life story of a young man called Augie March and is a lot like life itself I guess. Lots of boring stuff with some interesting and exciting stuff stuck in various places just enough to keep your attention.
Augie grows up in Chicago and a good deal of the book takes place there. He does travel outside this zone as he gets older --- to Mexico, to Europe, he joins the service and finally gets married. His story seems to be the reverse of a lot of stories on the list. While most people settle into a conventional life of job/domesticity, wife/husband, kids and then spend their time regretting the lives they did not get to lead, Augie spends his time having adventures and longing for a wife and home.
Augie's childhood in Chicago is full of interesting characters and anecdotes. He has a mother, two brothers, and a woman they live with called "grandma" to whom they are not related. Early on we are told of the essential differences between Augie and his older brother, Simon:
Simon had a distinguished record [at school]. President of the Loyal League, he wore the shield on his sweater, and was valedictorian. I didn't have his singleness of purpose but was more diffuse, and anybody who offered entertainment could get me to skip and do the alleys for junk, or prowl the boathouse and climb in the ironwork under the lagoon bridge.
This pretty much sums Augie up. As he gets older he gets a little more mature, but not by a whole lot. He tries to learn life's lessons and make some sense of it all:
Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.
His adventures include stealing books from bookstores to sell to students, working for a couple in a saddle shop and traveling with them, riding the rails home to Chicago when a scheme to smuggle immigrants into the country goes wrong, helping his girlfriend train an eagle to catch lizards in Mexico, surviving an attack on a ship during the war, and on like that. But here's the thing he finally is able to articulate about our essential aloneness as human beings-- while everyone appears to go around acting "normally", internally they are working like crazy:
It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requittal, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
We leave Augie with still a good his life to lead and I wonder if he is happy with the choices he has made and will make. It is worth a read if you have the patience for it.
Next week: Ernie and Sandra both read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
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