Excerpt from the Introduction by Martin Amis The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel. Search no further. All the trails went cold forty-two years ago. The quest did what quests very rarely do: it ended.    But what was that quest, anyway - itself so essentially American? No literary masterpiece or federal epic is mentioned in the Constitution, as one of the privileges and treats actually guaranteed to the populace, along with things like liberty and life and the right to bear computerized machineguns. Still, it is easy enough to imagine how such an aspiration might have developed. As its culture was evolving, and as cultural self-consciousness dawned, America found itself to be a youthful, vast and various land, peopled by non-Americans. So how about this place? Was it a continental holding-camp of Greeks, Jews, Brits, Italians, Scandinavians and Lithuanians, together with the remaining Amerindians from ice-age Mongolia? Or was it a nation, with an identity-with a soul? Who could begin to give the answer? Among such diversity, who could crystallize the American experience?    Like most quests, the quest for the Great American Novel seemed destined to be endless.

You won''t find that mythical beast, that holy grail, that earthly Eden-though you have to keep looking. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit was the thing; you were never going to catch up. It was very American to insist on having a Great American Novel, thus rounding off all the other benefits Americans enjoy. Nobody has ever worried about the Great French Novel or the Great Russian Novel (though it is entirely intelligible that there should be some cautious talk about the Great Australian Novel). Trying to find the Great American novel, rolling up your sleeves and trying to write it: this was American . And so it would go on, for ever, just as literature never progresses or improves but simply evolves and provides the model. The Great American Novel was a chimera; this mythical beast was a pig with wings. Miraculously, however, and uncovenantedly, Saul Bellow brought the animal home.

Bellow sorted it. He dedicated the book to his father and published it in 1953 and then settled down to write Seize the Day .    Literary criticism, as normally practised, will tend to get in the way of a novel like Augie March . Shaped (loosely) as an odyssey, and well stocked with (unsystematic) erudition -- with invocations and incantations -- the book is very vulnerable to the kind of glossarial jigsaw-solver who must find form : pattern, decor, lamination, colour-scheme. But that isn''t how the novel works on you. Books are partly about life, and partly about other books. Some books are largely about other books, and spawn yet other books. Augie March is all about life: it brings you up against the dead-end of life.

Bellow''s third novel, following the somewhat straitened performances of Dangling Man and The Victim , is above all free -- without inhibition. An epic about the so-called ordinary, it is a marvel of remorseless spontaneity. As a critic, therefore, you feel no urge to interpose yourself. Your job is to work your way round to the bits you want to quote. You are a guide in a gallery where the signs say Silence Please; you are shepherding your group from spectacle to spectacle - awed, humbled, and trying, so far as possible, to keep your mouth shut. * A brief outline. The Adventures of Augie March is about the formation of an identity, of a soul -- that of a parentless and penniless boy growing up in pre- and post-Depression Chicago. Augie''s mother is ''simple-minded'' and so is his younger brother Georgie, who ''was born an idiot''.

Simon, his older brother, is hard-headed; and Simon is all he''s got. The domestic configuration is established early on, with typical pathos and truthfulness:    Never but at such times, by necessity, was my father mentioned. I claimed to remember him; Simon denied that I did, and Simon was right. I liked to imagine it.    ''He wore a uniform,''I said. ''SureI remember.H e was a solider.''    ''Like hell he was.

You don''t know anything about it.''    ''Maybe a sailor.''    ''Like hell. He drove a truck for Hall Brothers laundry on Marshfield, that''s what he did. I said he used to wear a uniform. Monkey sees, monkey does; monkey hears, monkey says.'' His mother sewed buttonholes at a coat factory in a Wells Street loft and his father was a laundry driver; and Augie is simply ''the byblow of a traveling man''.    What comes across in these early pages- the novel''s first act - is the depth of the human divide between the hard and the soft.

The home, with its closed circle, tries to be soft. The outside world is all hard - isn''t it? (It certainly looks hard.) Georgie is soft. He puts ''his underlip forward'' in search of a kiss, ''chaste, lummoxy, caressing, gentle and diligent''. Given his chicken gizzard at noon, he ''blew at the ridgy thing more to cherish than to cool it''. Later, Georgie sits at the kitchen table ''with one foot stepping on the other'' while his grim future is grimly discussed. This leads to the famously unbearable scene where Augie accompanies his brother to the institution: We were about an hour getting to the Home- wired windows, dogproof cyclone fence, asphalt yard, great gloom . We were allowed to go up to the dormitory with him, where other kids stood around under the radiator high on the wall and watched us.

Mama took off Georgie''s coat and the manly hat, and in his shirt of large buttons, with whitish head and big white, chill fingers- it was troubling they were so man-sized - he kept by me beside the bed while I again showed him the simple little stunt of the satchel lock. But I failed to distract him from the terror of the place and of boys like himself around- he had never met such before. And now he realized that we would leave him and he began to do with his soul, that is, to let out his moan, worse for us than tears, though many grades below the pitch of weeping. Then Mama slumped down and gave in utterly. It was when she had the bristles of his special head between her hands and was kissing him that she began to cry. When I started after a while to draw her away he tried to follow. I cried also. I took him back to the bed and said, ''Sit here.

'' So he sat and moaned. We went down to the car stop and stood waiting by the black, humming pole for the trolley to come back from city limits.    Mama, too, simple, abandoned, a fool for love, is soft. As with Georgie, when Augie evokes his mother he accords her the beauty and mystery of a child. Family disruptions (of which there are many) frighten her: ''she was upright in her posture and like waiting for the grief to come to a stop; as if this stop would be called by a conductor''. But her distress is also adult, intimidating, unreachable. In the days after the decision is made to commit Georgie, Mama made no fuss or noise nor was seen weeping, but in an extreme and terrible way seemed to be watching out the kitchen window, until you came close and saw the tear-strengthened color of her green eyes and of her pink face, her gap-toothed mouth . she lay herself dumbly on the outcome of forces, without any work of mind .

In Augie''s childhood world, with its hesitancy and its peeled senses, it is as if everybody is too delicate to be touched. Too soft, or too hard - like Simon. Simon is Augie''s parallel self: the road not travelled. All Simon ever does is set himself the task of becoming a high-grade American barbarian; but on the page he becomes a figure of Shakespearian solidity, rendered with Dickensian force. And there is a kind of supercharged logic here. To the younger brother, the older brother fills the sky, and will assume these unholy dimensions. Simon sweats and fumes over the novel. Even when he is absent he is always there.

   Parentless and penniless: the basic human material. Penniless, Augie needs employment. If the novels of another great Chicagoan, Theodore Dreiser, sometimes feel like a long succession of job interviews, then Augie March often resembles a surrealist catalogue of apprenticeships. During the course of the novel Augie becomes (in order) a handbill-distributor, a paperboy, a dimcstorc packer, a news-vendor, a Christmas extra in a toy department, a flower-deliverer, a butler, a shoesalesman, a saddle-shop floorwalker, a hawker of rubberized paint, a dog-washer, a book-swiper, a coalyard helper, a housing surveyor, a union organizer, an animal-trainer, a gambler, a literary researcher, a salesman of business machines, a sailor, and a middleman of a war profiteer. As late as page 218 Augie is still poring over magazines in search of ''vocational hints''.    ''All the influences were waiting for me. I was born, and there they were to form me . '' Malleable and protean, ''easily appealed to'', busy ''trying things on'', Augie is a natural protege, willing prey for the nearest ''reality instructor'': would-be ''big personalities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildoers, big-wheels and imposersupon, absolutists''.

First there is Grandma Lausch (no relation), the old widow who directs and manipulates the March family with the power-crazed detachment of a eugenicist. ''Her eyes whitely contemptuous, with a terrible little naked yawn of her gums, suck-cheeked with unspoken comment'', Grandma Lausch is definitely of the hardness party. But she is old-world, Odessan, '' Eastern ''; and Augie''s subsequent mentors are embodiments of specifically Ame.