Bellow by Roth

Henderson the Rain King (1959)
"Only six years after Augie, and there he is again, breaking loose. But whereas with Augie he jettisons the conventions of his first two, "proper" books, with Henderson the Rain King he delivers himself from Augie, a book in no way proper. The exotic locale, the volcanic hero, the comic calamity that is his life, the inner turmoil of perpetual yearning, the magical craving quest, the mythical (Reichian?) regeneration through the great wet gush of the blocked-up stuff - all brand new.

To yoke together two mighty dissimilar endeavors: Bellow's Africa operates for Henderson as Kafka's castle village does for K., affording the perfect unknown testing ground for the alien hero to actualize the deepest, most ineradicable of his needs - to burst his 'spirit's sleep,' if he can, through the intensity of useful labor. 'I want,' that objectless elemental cri de coeur, could as easily have been K.'s as Eugene Henderson's. There all similarity ends, to be sure. Unlike the Kafkean man endlessly obstructed from achieving his desire, Henderson is the undirected human voice whose raging insistence miraculously does get through. K. is an initial, with the biographylessness - and the pathos - that that implies, while Henderson's biography weighs a ton. A boozer, a giant, a Gentile, a middle-aged multi-millionaire in a state of continual emotional upheaval, Henderson is hemmed in by the disorderly chaos of "my parents, my wives, my girls, my children, my farms, my animals, my habits, my money, my music lessons, my drunkenness, my prejudices, my brutality, my teeth, my face, my soul!" Because of all his deformities and mistakes, Henderson, in his own thinking, is as much a disease as he is a man. He takes leave of home (rather like the author who is imagining him) for a continent peopled by tribal blacks who turn out to be his very cure. Africa as medicine. Henderson the Remedy Maker.

Brilliantly funny, all new, a second enormous emancipation, a book that wants to be serious and unserious at the same time (and is), a book that invites an academic reading while ridiculing such a reading and sending it up, a stunt of a book, but a sincere stunt - a screwball book, but not without great screwball authority.

Philip Roth no Prefácio de Herzog.