There within the exuberance and overflow of Saul Bellow’s third novel is both the Dickensian tale of youth learning lessons the hard way and tense family drama where strangely all sides are partially right. While Bellow refuses to slow down his elaborate prose (which predicts the quality of true education,) the problems that confront Augie and his family continue to hint at lessons simply not learned.
After his failure in the train station gum/candy/newspaper business with big brother Simon, Augie is castigated. This period of being an outcast from his family leads to poor decision-making yet again. However, the family really only unites in the sense that they refuse any share of the blame. Augie, still in high school, gets roughed by a bully again over his science notes. After passing his new running buddy’s work as his own, Augie is basically “unwelcome.”
The fact is that the young man (and his friend) who simply roam the streets of Chicago all day can only find trouble. So after their petty crime money runs out, Augie and Jimmy Klein take jobs as Christmas elves at a local store. Running around in their outfits, and makeup, Augie and Jimmy shake tambourines to drive people to see the department store Santa waiting at the North Pole. Customers pitch quarters at them almost unknowingly, and when the pair gain the knowledge that none of their gatherings are being tallied or even counted, they decide to keep two quarters for every ten they make.
What is interesting about this bit of larceny is the attraction comes in knowing they can get away with it. What is even more interesting is that their greed weirdly translates into buying Christmas gifts for everyone in their families. Of course, it is only a matter of time before the folks at Deever's figure out their scheme and they are forced to give everything back - thus going from hero to zero yet again.
At home now for what seems to be good, a new conflict has emerged: what to do with Augie's younger intellectually disabled brother Georgie. Georgie needs supervision and care. He is growing into a man physically, but still a child mentally. Grandma Lausch predicts the worst, of course, with clinical logic (and possibly a secondary motive to regain power again.) Grandma Lausch thinks they should begin the paperwork toward institutionalizing him for his own good.
Simon reticently agreed. Mother falls on the other side not wanting to lose her youngest. Once removed from all processes and debate, Augie becomes the linchpin and sides with Mother saying that he would even take care of Georgie.
This becomes the fuse that lights the powderkeg within the family. While it is convenient to roast Augie (Grandma Lausch chillingly points out "When Augie works once in a while, there’s more trouble than money,") his inability to take care of himself and the family is easier for the other three to agree upon. After cross-examinating Grandma Lausch's argument in private with a diffident Simon, Augie even concludes in an inner dialogue that "He is making progress while I was making a fool of myself."
Critics have long complained that "Augie March" lacks plot and might be too ebullient in its language. While Bellow is to be lauded for his supplanting of Mark Twain's vernacular to shift between high-class/low-class in its freeing conversational tone. That energy obscures the intergenerational gaps developing within this decaying household. Without Bellow's wild flights of speech, "Augie March" might be too dour in its memory of a terrible period for nearly all Americans.
While Augie is indeed flawed and lacks the compass to know his right direction from the other one, we never seek to blame anyone but him for these faubles. The better news, neither does he. When he is busted for the skimming Santa's helper scam, we remember that it was Simon who inquired as to why he was not doing that in the first place at the newspaper stand instead of having to pay all of his earnings and more back on the losses he weathered. Now, even with the Georgie conundrum on the table, the family is truly in separate corners.
Here Bellow slowly lets the air out of the proverbial balloon. Grandma Lausch uses her calling to get Georgie on the list for the home as her last stand. Simon is completely detached. Like Grandma Lausch, Simon refuses to say goodbye to Georgie on his way out - because "I will be there to see him next week." Mother and Augie make the heartbreaking trip, and the mere mention of Georgie's painful moan is enough to bring you to tears (much like the Singer & Antonapoulos opening chapter of Carson McCullers' 1940 novel "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.")
In one crystallizing moment, Augie learns "that Georgie had been the main basis of household union and everything was disturbed." Everyone is now disappointed in all the remaining family members. The grand experiment is finished for Grandma Lausch, another family she could not save. Since Augie is the only character truly comfortable in this unsteady silence, he puts it all together.
What counted was natural endowment, and on that score she formed the opinion bitterly that we were not born with talents. Nonetheless we could be trained to be decent and gentlemanly, to wear white collars and have clean nails, brushed teeth, table manners, be brought up to fairly good pattern no matter what office we worked in, store we clerked in, teller's cage we reliably counted in - courteous in an elevator, prefatory in asking directions, courtly to ladies, grim and unanswering to streetwalkers, considerate in conveyances, and walking in the paths of a grayer, dimmer Castiglione. Instead, we were getting more common and rude, deeper-voiced, hairy.
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Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
NEW MUSIC This Week
MITSKI - The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We [ROBIN EGG BLUE LP/CD/CS](Dead Oceans/Secretly/AMPED) • The temporal being known as Mitski further evolves on this album of string-and-choir accompanied Indie Americana. If that is not a genre, it will be soon. With help from Drew Erickson and members of both Jack White's band and Pure Prairie League, Mitski questions her happiness and then expounds upon it musically. "Heaven" is more dreamy than anything she has ever released. The illuminating "Bug Like An Angel" is redemptive, especially with the lyric "Did you go and make promises? When you break them, they break you right back."
BARONESS - Stone [RED LP/CD](Abraxan Hymns/The Orchard) • Now in their twenties, Baroness ages into more of a Hard Rock band than ever on "Stone." "Shine" is brooding but driving especially thanks to the drumming of Sebastian Thomson. The Queens of the Stone Age-ian "Beneath The Rose" reaches for the sweeping choruses of old, and the charging epic "Last Word" refines their formerly sludgy low-strung guitar work for a bracing new attack.
K.FLAY - MONO [COKE BOTTLE LP/CD](Erskine/Giant) • Now moving over to Harry Styles (and Irving Azoff's) pet project labels, rapper/singer/songwriter K.Flay makes a move toward a more controlled Fletcher-like album where she asserts herself over old-style Dance Pop ("Raw Raw,") edgy Post-Punk ("Raw" with a pop chorus,) and most successfully the Alt. Metal "cannonball" she fires with Vic Fuentes of Pierce The Veil. "Irish Goodbye" is the best example of her using all the tricks at her disposal to get one very angry message across.
CORINNE BAILEY RAE - Black Rainbows [LP/CD](Thirty Tigers/The Orchard) • This is not the same Corinne Bailey Rae who sweetly crooned "Put Your Records On." In fact, this is not even the one who eloquently survived the death of her spouse on "The Sea." However, working with those two extremes, "Black Rainbows" attempts to put Bailey Rae into ten completely different soundscapes. She purrs like Nina Simone on the jazzy "Peach Velvet Sky" and then wails like a 77' New York punker on "New York Transit Queen." Along the way, she taps into new focus for her identity especially in uniting Electronica and R&B.
SHAKEY GRAVES - Movie of the Week [LP/CD](Dualtone) • Alejandro Rose-Garcia has never really been interested in making a straight Americana album. It was only an inventive way to play without a band originally. Now with a studio at his disposal, as Shakey Graves, he tries out Seventies Pop. "Big In The World" is an understated song of just being who he wants. So, he celebrates it with a maximal Beatlesque production that he clearly wants to drown out his yawp. The best news of all, one of the best singles of 2021, the gallows humor/love song "Ready or Not" with Sierra Ferrell has a full release.
THIRTY SECONDS TO MARS - It's The End of the World But It's a Beautiful Day [LP/CD](Concord) • Apparently, Jared Leto and his band wrote some 200 tracks inspired by '70s and '80s Electronic Music for their sixth album. With singles like "Stuck" and the stuttering "Life Is Beautiful," Thirty Seconds To Mars (no longer needing those digits) has far more in common with the blustery journal-lyric emissions that are EDM-shaped Pop today than anything before 1989. Sorry, nineteen eighty-nine.
BRISCOE - West of It All [LP/CD](ATO) • This pair of tall Texans may not be making music that you have not heard before. However, there is a warmth in their harmonies and the homespun writing they plow through with guitar and banjo. Unlike so many other Americana types, Truett Heintzelmann and Philip Lupton still manage to let songs like "The Well" have the space they need - much like the Texas Hill Country around Austin and not just the stages they shared with Zach Bryan.
REISSUES OF THE WEEK
LEON BRIDGES - Good Thing [CUSTARD LP](Columbia/RSD Essentials) • Discovered singing a song about his mama ("Lisa Sawyer") at open mic night in Fort Worth, TX, Leon Bridges rode his Sam Cooke-like voice and penchant for Sixties Soul to make a splash with his debut "Coming Home." Not wanting to be seen as a revivalist or pigeonholed into New Soul, Bridges leaped forward into Modern R&B on "Good Thing." Smartly, Bridges continued to work within his vocal range ("Bad Bad News") while using hitmaking producer Ricky Reed to drill into Pharrell-ian territory ("You Don't Know.") Still Bridges could not forget about his mother immortalizing her again on "Georgia To Texas."
JEFF BECK - Truth/Beck-Ola/Wired/Blow By Blow [LP](Legacy) • We lost a guitar legend this year - Jeff Beck. While he did not sing a lot ("Hi Ho Silver Lining" is still so charming,) you knew his guitar the minute he played a note. The fire that he displayed in The Yardbirds (replacing his friend Eric Clapton) only hinted at his solo power. August 1968's "Truth" remains his best and most exemplary work. With Micky Waller on drums and future Faces Ronnie Wood on bass and Rod Stewart on vocals, the Jeff Beck Group tore through standards ("Morning Dew" is a guitar tour-de-force") and originals (a thumping "Let Me Love You.") Their quick return for a second act on July 1969's "Beck-Ola" was not quite the lightning-in-a-bottle moment, but you can feel the friction driving "Rice Pudding" and "Plynth (Water Down The Drain)" to the same extremes as they disbanded shortly after its release.
When Beck was forming his new band with Carmine Appice and Tim Bogert, he suffered a car accident that kept him out of commission for over a year (Beck was also on the list to replace Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones.) When Bogert and Appice formed Cactus, Beck was left to start from scratch on the real Jeff Beck Group. While their pair of records do not quite harness the full potential of Beck fronting a band (watch the German TV performance,) they are necessary because Jazz and Soul started to enter the picture. So when Jeff Beck Group split, Beck toured with Bogert and Appice and enjoyed staying solo to play with David Bowie for a moment.
By the mid-Seventies, Beck's guitar god days felt like they were waning. Who should rescue him from this malaise? His new friend Stevie Wonder. Stevie admired Beck's guitar so much, he wrote "Superstition" for him. In addition, Beck's discovery of the British Jazz/Rock group Upp proved to be an impetus for a new direction. 1975's "Blow By Blow" and 1976's "Wired" saw Beck pulling his stellar guitar work into new shapes. In the Wonder composition, "Cause We've Ended As Lovers," Beck makes his guitar cry, moan and heat up the R&B ballad. while "Freeway Jam" became an AOR radio standard. Both records allowed Beck to work with the legendary George Martin who nursed his prowess through the familiar ("Led Boots") and a fantastic homage of Charles Mingus ("Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.") "Wired" would possibly go further in determining Beck's future as a solo artist. All four opened doors for Beck to become the go-to guitar soloist of the Eighties (Tina Turner's "Private Dancer.")
