It’s proper good reading this Augie March, it really is. Don’t always get it and some of it is frankly over my head, but so often passages deserve to be read again and savored. Like this one where Augie is returning from an accidental road trip across Michigan:
When evening came on we were tearing out of Gary and toward South Chicago, the fire and smudge mouth of the city gorping to us. As the flamy bay shivers for home-coming Neopolitans. You enter your native water like a fish. And there sits the great fish god or Dragon. You then bear your soul like a minnow before Dragon, in your familiar water.
Or this passage where Augie is ruminating on the subjectivity of bitterness:
And if the highest should come in that empty overheated tavern with its flies and the hot radio buzzing between the plays and plugged beer from Sox Park, what are you supposed to do but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the condition as found; all great beauty too, my scratched eyeballs will always see scratched. And there may gods turn up anywhere.
It’s really bloody good this book.
It is. Personal and sprawling at the same time, like when he flees the Union toughs to meet his girl…almost unbearably visceral, like Clarkson.