Like most of Bellow's best novels, Henderson employs traditional narrative devices with subtlety, but innovation is not really the author's rhetorical strong point. This book, like The Adventures of Augie March, is a variation on the picaresque novel, or an anecdotal narrative of the adventures of a scoundrel or a rascal narrated in related satiric or comic scenes. Often the picaro, or picaresque hero, comes to an understanding of his nature, his origins, and his role in life, as a result of his adventures. Certainly, this is the case in Bellow's application of the genre. Henderson casts a huge, funny figure in America and early in his adventure in Africa, but, as he confides early in the novel, "living proof of something of the highest importance has been communicated to me so I am obliged to communicate it."

Bellow's employment of the picaro who grows to an understanding...