BOOK REVIEW
The Neon Wilderness, Nelson Algren, Seven Stories Books, 2002
Parts of this review were used in a review of Algren’s classic Man With The Golden Arm. These short stories reflect the same milieu, that hard-hearted place where the lumpen proletariat and the working poor meet, that Algren worked in that novel. Algren throughout his literary career was working that same small vein- but what a mother lode he produced.
*****
Growing up in a post World War II built housing project this reviewer knew first hand the so-called ‘romance’ of drugs, the gun and the ne’er do well hustler. And also the mechanisms one needed to develop to survive at that place where the urban working poor meet and mix with the lumpen proletariat- the con men, dopesters, grifters drifters and gamblers who feed on the downtrodden. This is definitely not the mix that Damon Runyon celebrated in his Guys and Dolls-type stories. Far from it. Just read “A Bottle of Milk For Mother”.
Nelson Algren has gotten, through hanging around Chicago police stations and the sheer ability to observe, that sense of foreboding, despair and of the abyss of America’s mean streets down pat in a number of works, including this collection of his better stories. Along the way we meet an array of stoolies, cranks, crackpots and nasty brutish people who are more than willing to put obstacles in the way of anyone who gets in their way. Read “A Face On The Barroom Floor”- that will put you straight. But to what end. They lose in the end, and drag others down with them.
We, of late, have become rather inured to lumpen stories either of the 'death and destruction' type or of the 'rehabilitative' kind but at the time that these stories were put together in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s this was something of an eye-opener for those who were not familiar with the seamy side of urban life. The dead end jobs, the constant run-ins with the ‘authorities’ in the person of the police, many times corrupt as well. The dread of going to work, the dread of not going to work, the fear of being victimized and the glee of victimizing. The whole jumbled mix of people with few prospects and fewer dreams.
Algren has put it down in writing for all that care to read. These are not pretty stories. And he has centered his stories on the trials and tribulations of gimps, prostitutes and other hustlers. Damn, as much as I knew about the kind of things that Algren was describing these are still gripping stories. And, if the truth were told, you know as well as I do that unfortunately these stories could still be written today. Read Algren if you want to 'walk on the wild side'.
On "A Bottle Of Milk For Mother"
ReplyDeleteI noted in one of the commentaries “ The Romance of The Gun” in a series entitled Tales From The ‘ Hood that I did this spring (2008) about growing up in a housing project during the 1950’s that I was well aware of the closeness between the lumpen proletariat and the working poor in that milieu and that the pressures to ‘ get rich quick’ by illegal actions was a core ethos among the young men of the projects.
It held its attractions for my brothers and myself. It ultimately caught up with them and was a very close thing in my own case. Nelson Algren has set a look at that premise in Chicago in a little earlier period but with the same tensions in his powerful story “A Bottle Of Milk For Mother” . Once events are set in motion it appears that there is no way out for Bicek, the subject of the story. Bicek is one of my brothers, almost literally.
Fatalism abounds in this little tale as it does in the real life of the ‘hood. The last line of the story could have been written for my brothers or some of my childhood friends –“ I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one any how”. Powerful stuff. My little screed had an essentially political axis (after all I am trying to describe why, in the absence of a working class party, this layer is left to drift aimlessly under capitalism) but I would give much gold to have been able to use that one little literary sentence of Algren’s to describe what’s what.
On "Design For Departure"
ReplyDeleteNelson Algren’s little compilation of short stories is filled with episodes that I can personally relate to. I think that Studs Terkel said it best in his Afterword- these stories written over half a century ago still hold up as expressions of a very neglected slice of modern American life. Nobody wants to get their noses rubbed in this kind of thing but once you start reading you can’t put the thing down. As I mentioned in my review I was very aware of this kind of life and yet I was still drawn to the power of the stories.
No story in this compilation is any more powerful that the story of Mary’s aimlessly drifting away in Design For Departure. In a nutshell it explores the ravishes of dysfunction in an alcoholic family. Mary’s fatalistic response to the hand life has dealt her and her incapacity to break out of the cycle of poverty, dysfunction and self- hatred. The slippery-slope to surviving by prostitution and addiction is not a pleasant story to read, especially for those who experiences of sex and drugs were of a recreational nature in a middle class exploratory sense during the counter-cultural days of the 1960's. With all the safeguards and safety nets still protecting erratic actions. Mary's story is not of that world, not by a long shot.