L. EUGENE HENDERSON, a multimillionaire by trade and a pathetic, swaggering clown by nature, reached an imaginary point of no return when he was 55 years old and felt that he had to go to Africa. His incessant follies, his alcoholism (he was often drunk before lunch) and his mordant discontent were more than he could bear. Henderson was “moody, rough, tyrannical and probably mad.” But he was bored. He was unhappy. Raising pigs, learning to play the violin, doing hard physical labor on his estate near Danbury--nothing could soothe his tedium vitae and general agony of spirit. Henderson was a champion sufferer, a fabulously strong giant of a man with a sentimental heart and no common sense whatever. He is the hero and narrator of “Henderson the Rain King,” a peculiar, prolix and exasperating novel by Saul Bellow.

Saul Bellow is a talented and ambitious writer best known for his “The Adventures of Augie March,” which was published six years ago. The comic extravaganza about the absurdities and trials of modern life was also written in the first person by a narrator a trifle touched in the head. But rhapsodic, tedious and stupefying as “Augie” often was, it was also intermittently funny and spangled with examples of Mr. Bellow’s richly inventive imagination. As much cannot be said for “Henderson the Rain King,” which is an unsuccessful experiment, noble in purpose but dismal in result.

Threefold Wellspring of Prose

"Henderson the Rain King" contains three major elements: grotesque comedy, which hardly ever seems comic; fantasy and adventure in Central Africa, an Africa deliberately distorted so far from reality that one half expects to meet Tarzan and his faithful Waziri on any page, and a solemn quest for “the great principles of life”--for spiritual peace, happiness and communion with truth and deity. All three elements are mixed thoroughly together, with Henderson writing a supercharged prose unlike anything ever recorded in print before, with conversations between. . . .