nwhyte 's review for:

Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

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http://nhw.livejournal.com/695345.html[return][return]My Penguin edition described the book as "a comic novel...a hilarious, often ribald story". I confess I missed the joke; there didn't seem to me a single laugh-out-loud moment in this first-person narrative of an American who attempts to go native in Africa. Plenty of food for thought on the human condition; Henderson's moral decay is contrasted with his physical vigour, and his unfiltered deliberations on the meaning of life in general, and his own in particular, added up to a much more convincing portrait than, say, the central character in The Red Badge of Courage. I enjoyed the book. But I remain worried, not for the first time, that I have failed to grasp American humour.