Have I read this before: No. And I wish that was still true.

Review: Jesus FUCK

So a title like “The Adventures of Augie March” implies that the book is likely an exciting, romping tale of the trials and tribulations of the interesting titular character, right?

WRONG-O!

Oh my GOD this was boring.

Oh my GOD Augie was a passive, easy-to-manipulate bag of farts (I know this was half the point, but a line has to be drawn somewhere)

Oh my GOD I grappled with “do I actually have to read this or can I skip it?” more than I have with any other book in recent memory.

At no point did I care what happened to this guy. There was nothing about him that gripped me as a character and none of his “adventures” (apart from maybe the eagle training thing) were exciting. And the eagle training thing was only exciting because the eagle was the only being that exuded any sort of personality in this entire book.

Augie’s brother was ANNOYING. Every woman Augie encountered was ANNOYING. Augie himself didn’t have enough of a personality to be annoying, which itself was ANNOYING.

Like, there were attempts to give him an ounce of snark every 100 pages or so, but those attempts failed and just made him sound like an inconsistent character (and not on purpose).

Also, I had no motivation to care about Augie. He just wasn’t interesting to me at all. John Irving does the “regular character but interesting” thing really well; Bellow does not. I mean, it’s like:

Irving: here’s a character. You should be invested in him.
Me: why?
Irving: here are reasons.
Me: oh, okay.

Bellow: here’s a character. You should be invested in him.
Me: why?
Bellow: fuck you. Here are 17 pages about a button.

Seriously, this and The Optimist’s Daughter are going to be duking it out for my “worst book of 2022” title. At least The Optimist’s Daughter was relatively short.

Favorite Part: Seeing the “100%” in the corner of my Kindle so I could close this book and never have to look at it again.  

Rating: 2/10