Bellow's Henderson the Rain King Reading Order

Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King (1959) is his funniest novel and his most exuberantly comic — a picaresque story of Eugene Henderson, an enormous, loud, self-doubting Connecticut millionaire of fifty-five who has heard a voice inside him crying 'I want, I want, I want!' and who travels to Africa in search of transformation, ending up in two African kingdoms (fictional but carefully imagined) where he becomes, first, a catastrophic failure when he destroys a water cistern full of frogs, and then a Rain King when he lifts a giant idol. Bellow was writing in the tradition of the great comic novels of the nineteenth century — Dickens, Mark Twain — and Henderson is his most nakedly romantic hero: a man who is too large for his world in every sense, who wants a transformed self and is willing to be ridiculous in his pursuit of it. The novel has been read as a satire of American self-help culture, an anti-colonialist critique of the American appropriation of African spirituality, and a meditation on what it means to want more of life than life ordinarily gives. It is the ideal companion to Herzog and the most immediately enjoyable entry point to Bellow's fiction for readers who find the others too cerebral.