Fantastical Andrew Fox

Drunkard’s Walk
Frederik Pohl
Original Edition: Ballantine Books, 1960 (following serialization in Galaxy Science Fiction)
Most Recent Edition: Ballantine Books, 1973

Kampus
James Gunn
Original Edition: Bantam Books, 1977
Most Recent Edition: Kindle, 2010

Over the past thirty years, the level of interest in science fiction shown by academia has grown at least tenfold, with hundreds of campuses now offering courses on science fiction as literature or science fiction as a prominent branch of popular culture, and a handful of universities offering full degree programs in science fiction. However, the level of interest running in the opposite direction – the interest of science fiction authors in extrapolating the future of academia—has been rather lower. Few major works of science fiction have taken up potential future developments in higher education as their primary subject. I find this to be a bit surprising, given the not insubstantial contingent of science fiction writers who currently earn the majority or a sizable portion of their income serving as university faculty.

Examining potential futures for academia and the university system is a timely endeavor. America’s university system, long considered one of the crown jewels of the nation’s economic and social infrastructure, now finds itself at the confluence of powerful societal trends, technological, economic, and political in nature, which will almost certainly reshape much of that system within a decade or two into forms which may be drastically different from the norms we as a society have become accustomed to since the Second World War and the granting of the G.I. Bill educational benefits to veterans.

Much has been written in recent years about the suspected inflation of a higher education bubble which mimics in many of its aspects the housing bubble whose bursting brought on the 2008 recession. Since 1985, the cost of college tuition and fees has increased nearly 500%, versus a 115% increase in overall consumer prices. Student loans, a majority of which are backed by the federal government, are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, and many students find themselves graduating from a four-year program of liberal arts study with the equivalent of a home mortgage (debt loads for many graduates of private universities approach a quarter of a million dollars, with the graduates of public universities not far behind). Even worse off than the graduates are the more numerous drop-outs; they are saddled with sizable debt burdens but have no credential in hand to assist them in finding work which will allow them to repay their loans. Many observers feel that current trends in higher education are unsustainable and that a crisis, or a combination of crises, will force the system into radical change.

What might those changes look like? Two prominent science fiction authors, Frederik Pohl and James Gunn, have painted portraits of potential futures for the higher education system. Their novels were published seventeen years apart – Pohl’s Drunkard’s Walk in 1960 and Gunn’s Kampus in 1977. Giving credence to the truism that science fiction is more about the present than it is about the future, each book strongly reflects the academic milieu which was prevalent during the period of its writing: for Pohl’s, the Sputnik Era, fear-driven lionization of the hard sciences and the concurrent dedication of significant government funding to basic research efforts at the universities; and for Gunn’s, the student radicalism and participatory democracy and identity group power movements of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, which, by 1977, had mostly retreated from large-scale public protests to their bases on university campuses.

Drunkard’s Walk was originally serialized in a shorter form in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1960. Pohl’s novel has the feel of a typical late-1950s Galaxy story: a surface urbanity and wit, many clever turns of plot, and characterization about as deep as that found in a Twilight Zone episode of the same era. The novel-length Drunkard’s Walk, although not a long book, suffers some from excess padding glued to its flanks during the effort to expand it from a novella to a novel; many of the chapters told from the vantage point of a supporting character, Master Carl, feel tacked on and unnecessary. The primary problem faced by the protagonist, Master Cornut, a mathematics professor at an unnamed University, is both original and compelling—during periods of partial consciousness, such as when he is on the verge of falling asleep, has just woken up, or is distracted by the progress of one of his own lectures, Cornut is plagued by an autonomous compulsion to commit suicide, despite being a happy, privileged, and well-adjusted individual. He is forced to rely upon the watchfulness of those who live adjacent to his on-campus living quarters, initially students and later his student wife, to keep himself from slitting his own throat or hurling himself over the railing of his apartment’s balcony. Where the plot ultimately heads is less fresh, at least from the present vantage point of an additional half-century of science fiction stories and films, involving as it does the trope of a conspiracy of secret immortals who seek to wipe out potential rivals before those rivals can realize their own power.

For today’s reader, the primary draw of Drunkard’s Walk may be its setting, the University where Master Cornut teaches. Pohl paints the University as a refuge from the overcrowded, tumultuous outside world, where a sizable portion of the American lower middle class is forced to live on “texases,” off-shore platforms originally constructed as early-warning radar installations, which are now used for dirty jobs such as manufacturing and raw materials processing (each texas produces its own power from the wave energy that crashes continuously against its support legs). The book’s most accurate extrapolation is Pohl’s envisioning of distance learning; each professor’s lectures are taped and broadcast, reaching audiences of millions, those who either aspire to degrees of higher learning or who desire access to knowledge:

“Cornut had more than a hundred live watchers—the cream; the chosen ones who were allowed to attend University in person—but his viewers altogether numbered three million. …

“For education was something very precious indeed.

“The thirty thousand at the University were the lucky ones; they had passed the tests, stiffer every year. Not one out of a thousand passed those tests; it wasn’t only a matter of intelligence, it was a matter of having the talents that could make a University education fruitful—in terms of society. For the world had to work. The world was too big to be idle. The land that had fed three billion people now had to feed twelve billion.

“Cornut’s television audience could, if it wished, take tests and accumulate credits. … Almost always the credits led nowhere. But to those trapped in dreary production or drearier caretaker jobs for society, the hope was important. There was a young man named Max Steck, for example, who had already made a small contribution to the theory of normed rings. It was not enough. Sticky Dick said he would not justify a career in mathematics. He was trapped as a sexwriter, for Sticky Dick’s analyzers had found him prurient-minded and creative. There were thousands of Max Stecks.

“Then there was Charles Bingham. He was a reactor hand at the 14th Street generating plant. Mathematics might help him, in time, become a supervising engineer. It also might not—the candidates for that job were lined up fifty deep. But there were half a million Charles Binghams. …

“These, the millions of them, were the invisible audience who watched Master Cornut’s image on a cathode screen.”

Pohl places the University’s professors, or Masters, at the top of his social pecking order. Masters may take advantage of a sort of droit de seigneur regarding the University’s students. Conjugal relations between professors and students are encouraged, being viewed as beneficial to each, and what are called “term marriages” are common, which may last (presumably on the Master’s prerogative) as briefly as a few weeks. There is a strict separation between Town and Gown, with the latter acting in many ways as a sort of hereditary landed aristocracy, but one which sometimes opts to absorb very talented members of the former into its ranks (as scholarship students).

That strict separation between Town and Gown is mirrored in James Gunn’s Kampus, but the relative status of the two is nearly inverted. Gunn, born in 1923 (four years after Frederik Pohl), is a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas and the director of its Center for the Study of Science Fiction. Following an estimable career as a science fiction author and anthologist, he became one of the pioneering academicians to teach science fiction. He was a personal witness (from the faculty side) to the campus upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and the first third of Kampus takes place on the University of Kansas campus at some point early in the twenty-first century. A series of social upheavals has caused state governments to essentially surrender their university campuses to student control. Walled off from the surrounding communities, the campuses act as holding pens for the revolutionary young adult offspring of the middle and upper middle classes, who are free to act out their anarchistic, communitarian, or socialist fantasies within the walls. Symbols of authority are still present, in the form of Kampuskops, but these are more actors in revolutionary theater than agents of bureaucratic control, present mainly to give the student activists and revolutionaries someone to act against.

In contrast to the University portrayed in Drunkard’s Walk, within the universities of Kampus the professors have virtually no social status at all. In the absence of state financial support, they are reduced to competing with one another for paying students, each trying to outdo the others with promises of lurid classroom content, skills to be gained in manipulating peers, and drug experimentation. Professors must be transported to and from their classrooms in armored cars, since campuses are rife with plots to kidnap them and demand various forms of ransom. Students live in self-righteous squalor, mostly unaware that small cadres of student leaders pull their strings and benefit from unlimited sexual partners and access to endless supplies of psychoactive drugs. These cadres keep the student populations entertained and distracted with violent demonstrations on campus and destructive raids into the surrounding communities, which hate and fear the students.

Very little in the way of active learning takes place. Students are supplied with their degree parchments on the first day of their matriculation; they are also issued learning pills that encode the peptides of popular professors and allow some forms of knowledge to be effortlessly passed on. The novel’s protagonist, Tom Gavin, enrolls in a philosophy course offered by one of the few traditional professors remaining on campus. He becomes so enthralled with the Socratic experience that he plots to kidnap the Professor in order to extract peptides from his blood and create new learning pills that will allow Tom to internalize all of his knowledge. The kidnapping leads to a regrettable denouement, but before it does, the Professor has an opportunity to deliver a potted history of the devolution of higher education:

“‘Here I stand,’ the Professor said, ‘tearing my breast to bleeding shreds like the fabled pelican to feed you ungrateful chicks, in a place where learning has fled, where man has retreated from intellectual activity to ritual. I have lived through it all. I have seen the University retreat from educational standards and academic freedom through autonomous black-studies curricula, general studies, and student participation in University governance to total lack of concern for objective educational criteria and to the abandonment of the campus by serious scholars and scientists. Where has learning fled?

“‘How many of you know that when you matriculate in this University you are automatically awarded a degree? Of course, most of you stay around to play in the sandbox you call a university, and a few of you, to seek out an education. Where has learning fled?

“‘The practice of students hiring and paying their own teachers goes back to the first university, at Bologna, founded in the eleventh century, but it soon was recognized as the pure bologna it was. Students do not know what they need to know; if they knew, they would not need teachers. Well, the Dark Ages returned as public support for higher education gradually was withdrawn from campuses, enrollments began declining, and faculty became increasingly dependent upon student fees; the ancient pattern of student control and student hiring, firing, and payment of faculty reestablished itself. The result, you see around you–not teachers but charlatans, pimps pandering to student lusts in the name of relevance. Relevance–that’s what we call it when our prejudices are reinforced. A basic principle of education is that you cannot learn anything from someone with whom you agree.'”

Student rivalries and the machinations of StudEx, the student leadership executive board, force Tom to leave the University of Kansas once he has become a threat to StudEx’s power. He sets out across the country, Candide-like, confident in his revolutionary-socialist-egalitarian ideals, to see for himself the semi-legendary University of California at Berkeley, the font of the student revolutionary movement. He falls in with a young female companion of a much more practical bent, an orphan who graduated from the school of hard knocks and who has no patience for Tom’s high-flown ideals, but who loves him and tries (not always successfully) to protect him from the consequences of his own naiveté. On the course of their travels, we readers discover “where the learning has gone:” practical, technical instruction has migrated to a system of highly automated community colleges, matriculating a mostly lower class and working class student body who are motivated to achieve wealth, not social equality, and theoretical and applied research have left the universities for secluded mountain havens funded by philanthropic billionaires.

Kampus is a more ambitious novel than Drunkard’s Walk. Its characters, at least the protagonists, are drawn with greater psychological depth than those of the earlier book. Pohl’s prose is sturdy and workmanlike, never flashy or evocative, whereas Gunn’s frequently achieves real beauty. If Kampus can be said to have a significant flaw, it is that too many of its well delineated and highly entertaining episodes teach the same lesson to Tom Gavin, who, until the book’s end, seems stubbornly resistant to learning what is endlessly rubbed in his face – that beautiful ideals may often hide venal motivations, and that violence, rape, and theft committed in the stated pursuit of a more egalitarian society are still violence, rape, and theft. Many readers will be tempted to give up on Tom halfway through the novel, but the charm and vividness of Gunn’s prose, plus his deft hand at keeping his plot moving, will keep them on board through the end. Some reviewers have remarked that the scenarios extrapolated in Kampus are dated and were dated even when the book was written in 1977. However, the recent saga of Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy movements around the country makes many of the events and actors of Kampus feel very current.

Which of the novels is more relevant to the situation faced by higher education today? Pohl was certainly on to something with his description of the ubiquity of distance learning, and Gunn made prescient points concerning the growing divide between teaching and research and the likelihood that, should colleges and universities abandon the teaching of the practical arts, other institutions (such as the Internet) will rise to fill the gap. Interestingly, whereas the earlier book portrayed the professors as the top of the heap and the latter book did the same for the students, in actuality a third group, hardly mentioned by either novel, appears to have been the biggest beneficiary of the enormous growths in university budgets over the past thirty years – the administrators. As the numbers of tenured faculty have plummeted at most colleges and universities, replaced by adjunct or part-time instructors, the numbers of administrators and managers, in new areas like environmental compliance and diversity observance, have skyrocketed, and many of those administrators enjoy salaries and power well beyond those extended to professors.

My own recent novel No Direction Home posits a third possible future for higher education. In the mid-twenty-first century, much of the middle class has abandoned the old American Dream of homeownership and college education. A large portion of the population has taken up a nomadic existence, living as gypsies in their electric cars and moving between short-term jobs, flowing wherever the demand for labor arises. Most states, strapped for cash, have closed their public universities. College education has reverted to what it was prior to the Second World War – a status good, a privilege available primarily to the wealthy. Most gypsies obtain what training and education they need for their short-term jobs from the Internet setups built into their vehicles, and they are guided in their courses of learning by one-time professors, laid off from public universities, who now accompany the gypsy crews on their travels. Those gypsies who wish to pursue non-vocational learning attend roadside seminars and salons offered by the professors, after-work perks provided by the organizers of the crews.

So the future I’ve envisioned for higher education combines elements of Frederik Pohl’s extrapolations (universities limited to the wealthy and/or privileged; widespread distance learning) with those of James Gunn’s (teachers as migrant free agents offering their services to students; practical training provided in electronic form). For what it is worth, I wrote my novel prior to reading either Drunkard’s Walk or Kampus. The confluence between my book and theirs proves to me yet again that science fiction is a conversation carried out over decades, with effective exchanges taking place even in the absence of direct influence or knowledge; a form of telepathy between writers, perhaps, or at least of the convergent modes of thinking that arise from the practice of science fiction.

In a recursive hall of mirrors, professors who are science fiction writers may teach science fiction books about the future of academia… wherein science fiction writers teach books extrapolating the future of academia…

By pure happenstance, the last two books I read were both bildungsromans, novels of growing up, published within a quarter century of one another, with some marked similarities. Each was published to some acclaim, their authors being held in high regard by contemporary critics; yet the passage of time has proven far kinder to one book (and its author) than to the other. One of the books has never been out of print, is hailed as a masterpiece of twentieth century American literature, and continues to be widely read. The other has been reprinted only sporadically, most recently by a tiny university press, is noted (if at all) as a possible inspiration for a far more famous and influential media property, and its author is mostly forgotten, even in the genre of literature (speculative fiction) within which he published his most famous works. I approached the two novels with vastly different expectations. One, the one I had expected to love, was a partial disappointment, at times a taxing and tiresome read. The other, the one I had anticipated skimming mostly for historical and anthropological interest, turned out to be an unexpectedly moving and rewarding reading experience.

The two books are Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and Philip Wylie’s Gladiator (1930). It is possible these particular two books have never been compared to one another before. I just performed a Google search; apart from my own blog post of earlier this week, I didn’t come across a single website or article that so much as mentions both books in the same context. I would guess most critics and literary reviewers would scoff at the notion of even mentioning the two books in the same breath. One is considered “serious literature” and the other “genre fiction” or “popular entertainment.” Augie March was awarded the National Book Award and is considered a masterpiece of one of America’s most highly regarded writers. Gladiator is remembered only by science fiction and superhero comic book buffs, and only by tiny minorities of those two communities. Yet I would propose, after having read the book, that Philip Wylie’s intentions in the areas of philosophical questioning and the exploration of how a character matures under duress were no less lofty than those of Saul Bellow twenty-three years later. Gladiator was not originally published as a serial in a pulp magazine or a dime novel; it was published by Alfred Knopf, and at the time of its publication, Philip Wylie was acquiring a reputation as an American H. G. Wells, a writer who combined serious social extrapolation with his fiction.

The similarities between the two novels’ protagonists and storylines are numerous. Both Augie March and Hugo Danner come from poor or lower middle class backgrounds in the Midwest or West (Augie from Chicago, Hugo from small town Colorado). Both characters are set apart from their peers by an innate peculiarity; for Hugo, it is his super-human strength and invulnerability, and for Augie, an unwillingness to apply himself to any particular goal, combined with a chameleon-like surface affability that causes more purposeful characters to continually pull Augie into their schemes. Both are bright and introspective, and both are given to warmth towards others. Both young men are powerfully attracted to college life, but neither succeeds at fitting into the college milieu. Both experience a long series of odd jobs and are faced with periods of hunger and physical deprivation, which alternate with episodes of improved fortune and relative luxury. Both join the Merchant Marine. Both Hugo and Augie are sucked by enthusiasm and events into war, Hugo into the First World War and Augie into the Second World War. Both are unsuccessful in love and experience a series of disappointing romances. Both occasionally run afoul of the law. Both come close to becoming involved with the Communist Party but ultimately avoid that fate. And both spend significant times of their young lives in rural Mexico.

That’s a long list of superficial similarities. Yet one book is universally considered “literature,” and the other is typically relegated to some stratum of “sub-literature.” Why? I’ve read them both, back to back, and I would not make that distinction between these two particular books. The literary critic D. G. Myers has wrestled with the notion of what constitutes literature, and this is what he has to say: “Literature is simply good writing—where ‘good’ has, by definition, no fixed definition.” He is saying that ‘good,’ if it has no fixed definition, is a subjective determination of value that varies from reader to reader. So what is my definition of a ‘good’ book? I’ve been a voracious reader much of my life. I have read books which have delighted me and stayed with me, and I have abandoned other books thirty pages in because I decided they were not worth my expenditure of time. I can list a number of qualities or “effects” which, if a book possesses them or elicits enough of those effects in me, lead me to place that book on my list of “good books.” They are:

Does the book delight me? Delight may include (1) surprising me with unexpected turns of events (but not events which defy established logics of the book’s characters or world); (2) providing me with a sense of aesthetic pleasure through skillful and evocative use of language; (3) introducing me to intriguing new (to me) places, new periods of history, or new activities, or portraying places, times, or activities with which I’m already familiar in a way new and illuminating to me; (4) making me laugh; (5) providing me with a sense of satisfaction or gratifying completion by following a pattern or structure which becomes apparent to me once I have finished reading the book, allowing me a thrill of recognition of at least some of the author’s intent; or (6) provides me with a sense of companionship from having spent time with a protagonist who strikes me as believable, well fleshed-out, and possessing interesting thoughts, observations, and opinions.

Does the book sustain my interest all the way through? Or does it bore or fatigue me? Do I comfortably remain within the “soap bubble” of the book’s imagined world, or do I find myself easily distracted and pulled away from the story and the prose?

Does the book arouse my emotions? Do I feel a sense of empathy for the protagonist and other characters?

Do parts of the book linger with me after I’ve finished reading it? Do I find myself reflecting back on a character’s dilemma or experience? Do any images which the book induced in my imagination recur in my imagination after that first impression? Do I continue hearing a character’s distinctive voice? Do I seek out memories of the book and replay them in my mind, rolling their flavors again over my tongue, because they are pleasurable?

Do I have any desire to reread the book at some time in the future?

Did I feel less alone while reading the book? Did the book allow me to feel less a “separate self,” cut off from the inner lives of other people?

While in the midst of reading the book, was I eager to pick it up again?

Would I be eager to recommend the book to friends?

Those are my criteria, my personal, subjective criteria, for judging the “goodness” of a book. So, taking these criteria into account, how do Gladiator and The Adventures of Augie March stack up against one another? I judge that each book scores points in different categories, and each holds distinct advantages over the other.

Gladiator was better at holding my attention all the way through than Augie March was. Hugo Danner’s central dilemma is simply more interesting and compelling than Augie March’s is. Hugo is a man born with the strength and resistance to hurt and harm that many of us fantasize about, and he is a man who wishes only to do well and right in the world, but who is stymied again and again by the limitations of his own imagination and the emotional shortcomings of those around him. Yet he continues to struggle against what seems a punishing Fate, thus earning in the reader’s mind the appellation “gladiator.” Augie is a smart and talented young man who is unable to settle on any particular goal and who ends up allowing people around him to draw him into their own designs and schemes, to Augie’s frequent disappointment. As a reader, I kept wanting to reach into the book and shake Augie’s shoulders and tell him, “Decide all ready! Make up your mind! Settle on a goal and apply yourself!”

Augie March provided me with more instances of delight than Gladiator did, but also far more instances of boredom, frustration, and temptation to set the book aside and start something else. Augie’s world teems with individually fascinating, grotesque, or bizarre minor characters, but at times this becomes a suffocating avalanche of riches. Particularly in the book’s first sixty pages, when Augie is still a child, we are introduced to one thoroughly fleshed-out minor character after another, many of them Dickensian in their individuality and strangeness, and the cumulative effect, for me, at least, was a sense of, “Why should I care about all these obnoxious, argumentative, and sometimes loathsome people?” Some of them go on to play major roles in the novel. Some do not. But I nearly bailed out on the book after fifty pages, particularly since Augie, its protagonist, was so undefined at that point and so overshadowed by this mass of unsympathetic minor characters. On average, the minor characters in Gladiator are much more flat and ill-defined than the minor characters in Augie March. Not all of them, but some; Hugo’s friends at college are little more than stock characterizations, quickly sketched, for example, as are the Communist Party organizer and archeologist depicted near the novel’s end, but the women Hugo becomes romantically involved with have inner lives to which we are given access, as do his father and his closest friend in the French Foreign Legion. Hugo lives in a less rich, abundant world of humanity than Augie does, but the minor characters in Hugo’s world don’t threaten to derail the novel’s plot or choke the reader with their superabundance, either.

Now that I have a little distance from both books, I find myself feeling closer to Augie than to Hugo. Augie’s voice remains with me more than Hugo’s does. This may be due, in part, to having experienced Augie’s first-person narration of his story for nearly six hundred pages, as opposed to experiencing Hugo’s story in third-person narration throughout a book less than half as long. But in great part this is due to one of Saul Bellow’s greatest strengths as a writer, his ability to create a very distinctive and memorable voice for his protagonists. Augie lingers with me due to his voice, his affability, his eagerness for love and openness to new experiences, his generosity in refraining from harsh judgements of his family, friends, and lovers, even when they’ve earned harsh judgement, and his self-deprecating sense of humor. He is a man I wouldn’t mind knowing personally, a man I could see easily befriending. On the other hand, he can be very tiresome, too. Oftentimes in the novel he is like one of those inebriated friends you found yourself sitting next to at a party in college, going on, and on, and on about various pet theories and philosophical notions. At some point, you want to say, “Go home, Augie! Get yourself to bed and sleep it off! I just can’t listen anymore!”

What were the high points of The Adventures of Augie March for me? As a reader, I wouldn’t change a thing about the entire sequence that takes place in Mexico — the eagle training, the assorted expatriots, and Augie’s ill-fated romance. It captivated me and will likely stick with me as one of my brightest memories of reading. Nearly as memorable and good were the “fish out of water” scenes of Augie being taken under the wings of various wealthy benefactors, his adult interactions with his older brother, the scenes of him making a precarious living by stealing textbooks, and the scenes of him floating in a lifeboat with an overly garrulous fellow survivor after his freighter is torpedoed by a U-boat.

What about the high points of Gladiator? The sequence of scenes of Hugo fighting on the Western Front in France during the First World War are, in my mind, the heart of the book. At last, he finds himself in an environment where he doesn’t need to hide his strength, where he can push himself to the utmost of his abilities in pursuit of what he considers a noble goal, the victory of the Allied Powers. We readers all expect Hugo’s tremendous strength and ability to withstand machine gun fire to prove decisive. We’re rooting for him. But we are then confronted with the shocking irony that the war is too big, too destructive, too senseless for even Hugo to make more than a ripple in its ocean. As I stated in my earlier essay on Gladiator, “even a man who can kill a thousand enemies in a single night is overshadowed by a war in which a single battle could result in half a million casualties.” Hugo’s commanders, while appreciative of his prowess, are too shortsighted, too unimaginative, and too stuck in conventional lines of military thinking to use him for much more than scouting or preventing their own trenches from being overrun. After Hugo’s best friend is killed by a German artillery shell and Hugo loses control of himself, wading into the German trenches and killing thousands of soldiers with his bare hands, he finds himself unable to exploit the momentary hole he has made in the German lines because he has reached the limits of his stamina and must retreat to his own trenches in order to eat and sleep. By the time he finally decides to go AWOL and attempt a scheme to end the war on his own by stealing an airplane, flying into Germany, and personally killing the German political leadership in Berlin, the Armistice is announced. The war ends without his having made an appreciable difference in it. The super-man might as well never have been a soldier at all.

Also very good are the scenes of Hugo attempting to earn money for college as a sideshow strongman in the midway at Coney Island. Philip Wylie paints these scenes and the characters Hugo interacts with there with nearly as deft a touch and an eye for telling detail as Saul Bellow exhibits in his portrayal of Augie’s Chicago. Much less effective, however, are Gladiator‘s final sequences, from the death of Hugo’s father on. I got the impression that Wylie must’ve written the last parts of the book in a rush to make a deadline, because the scenes of Hugo in Washington, DC and in Mexico feel flat and lifeless, almost cartoonish. The Adventures of Augie March does not end on a particularly strong note, either. I came to the final page and felt as if Bellow had simply said, “Enough!”

Which book would I be more eager to reread or to recommend to a friend? If I could have a greatly pruned The Adventures of Augie March, sort of a Portable Augie March, I would happily dive into it again and would enthusiastically recommend it to my friends. As the book stands, however, I could only recommend it with qualifications, and if I were to pick it up again, I would skip hundreds of its pages and run to the book’s central pleasure, the scenes in Mexico. I could read Gladiator again, but with less pleasure than I would take from rereading the Mexico portions of Augie March. Gladiator is a more consistent read, overall, than Augie March is, and I would judge it to be a better structured book. But I would also judge the high points of Augie March to soar higher than the high points of Gladiator.

So, of these two bildungsromans which I read back to back, which one would I say is the better book? After a good deal of consideration, I’d have to pick The Adventures of Augie March. But Augie wins on points, not by a knockout. So as a fight official, my score card is vastly different, I would imagine, from those of most critics, who would declare that these two novels don’t even belong in the same weight class or the same ring and would declare a mismatch. I don’t agree. “Let ’em fight!” I say.

Addendum: Looks like I misinterpreted D. G. Myers’ remarks above. He wrote to let me know that, contrary to my statement, “(Myers) is saying that ‘good,’ if it has no fixed definition, is a subjective determination of value that varies from reader to reader,” he does in fact believe literary value is objective and extrinsic, as he explains in this blog post.

My apologies to Professor Myers for any misunderstanding.