I’ve been reading The Adventures of Augie March, which is my first encounter with Saul Bellow. So far, it’s a bit listy for me (“rubbing elbows with bigshots and operators, commissioners, grabbers, heelers, tipsters, hoodlums, wolves, fixers, plaintiffs, flatfeet, men in Western hats and women in lizard shoes and fur coats . . .”), but I’ll stick it out because no matter how glutinous it becomes, and no matter how often he shows off by using a classical reference to describe some ordinary event, he still writes something outstanding on every page. It’s similar to the way you can tell that someone is a great musician even if he’s playing a piece you don’t like.
The only snag came when I started noticing that certain words were rendered with British spelling — colour, flavour, labour (though thankfully “jail” is not rendered as gaol). This was jarring, since it’s supposed to be the Great American Novel. It turns out that the copy I was reading was edited for British distribution, and the publisher evidently felt that if U.K. readers were presented with “labor” or “color” they would think it was a typo.
American publishers don’t usually do the same thing in reverse. I’ve read a lot of British authors (I’m one of those “if it doesn’t have an English country house, it isn’t a novel” types), and keeping the original spelling really helps you imagine all the elided r’s and elongated a’s and recessive accents and such. These things don’t always come across in print, but the extra u makes a big difference.
But Anglicizing the speech of Bellow’s characters has the opposite effect. They’re supposed to be earthy, rough-and-tumble 1920s and 1930s Chicago Jews, but when I read one of them saying, for example, “Not just a neighbourhood movie . . .” (in single quotation marks yet, and with “honoured” on the same page), the extra u uncontrollably makes me imagine him or her sounding like Hugh Grant or Helen Mirren, and it just doesn’t work at all. Maybe I’ve been a copy editor too long.