Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: The Adventures of Augie March

I usually carry a book with me everywhere, allowing me to catch up on my reading, if the subway is slow to arrive or if the laundry is taking longer than it should. Most of the time, no one comments on what I’m reading—no one cares, unless it’s Saul Bellow. More times than I could count, some old man has sat down next to me while I was reading a Bellow book, and told me that I should also read Herzog or Humboldt’s Gift. I’ve had long conversations with these strange old men, and intend to become one of them myself, when my time comes. Which Bellow will I lecture strangers about? The Adventures of Augie March. Since graduating school, no book has impressed me as much as Augie March. It captures the energy of the country in the early part of the last century, and it does it in a style that’s tightly wound and exact. In later years, Bellows became a nasty old man, full of conservatism and bile, but in his youth he was up there with the greatest novelists America has ever produced. Read Augie March.

Bio: Meakin Armstrong is Guernica’s fiction editor. Read his last recommendation here.