Books: What Makes Augie Run?

THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH (536 pp.)—Saul Bellow—Viking ($4.50).

Augie March had not yet attained the age of immorality when his father abandoned Augie's simple-minded mother and her three sons, one an idiot, in a Chicago slum. The impoverished Jewish family lived on charity and the wits of Grandma Lausch, an imperious boarder who tried to teach Augie principles of good behavior. But Augie tailed along with neighborhood hoodlums, stole pennies from newsstands, quarters from a shop where he briefly worked, ladies' handbags in a planned robbery. While older brother Simon, out to get...