Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow is a fun, surprising novel. It's among my favorite of Bellow's novels, right up there with Herzog and Humboldt's Gift. It lacks the gravity of those two, so it reads like a more polished The Adventures of Augie March: just as silly, but in a foreign locale. The novel follows protagonist Eugene Henderson--a millionaire heir with a relentless, unidentified urge for more in life--through his ill-fated travels in the African interior. Henderson is pompous, dunderheaded, and strangely endearing. Encountering indigenous cultures that he can't begin to understand, he throws himself into their lives and rituals with good-natured aplomb, only to create larger problems than existed before. He's a buffoon, and yet the other characters (and reader) root for him to find that elusive thing, the thing that brought him to Africa.
Henderson the Rain King is Bellow's favorite novel. There's a Counting Crows song named after it. It was a Pulitzer finalist. While there's certainly a critique to be made about the cross-cultural depictions (and a defense, I think: the narrator is a jackass), it remains a successful novel. I think a lot of this comes from employing a tone that I see in most Wes Anderson films: low-grade persistent absurdity that will unexpectedly veer into real melancholy. Like Rushmore or The French Dispatch or Moonrise Kingdom, for most of the novel you're laughing or at least smiling. And then, apropos of nothing, a scene of beautiful, heartbreaking, human connection.
