Another Walk On The Wild Side with Nelson Algren

BOOK REVIEW

A Walk on the Wild Side, Nelson Algren, The Noonday Press, 1984

As I have mentioned in other reviews of Nelson Algren's work, such as The Man With The Golden Arm and The Neon Wilderness, I am personally very familiar with the social milieu that he is working. Growing up in a post-World War II built housing project this reviewer knew first hand the so-called `romance' of drugs, the gun, the ne'er do well hustler and the fallen sister. And I also learned the complex mechanisms one needed to develop in order 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.

Nelson Algren has once again, through hanging around Chicago police stations (does anyone describe that milieu, cops and criminals, better?), other nefarious locales and the sheer ability to observe, gotten that sense of foreboding, despair and the just plain oblivion of America's mean streets down pat. In this, probably his best literary endeavor in that vein, Algren has gotten down to the core of existence for the would be world-beater hustler Dove Linkhorn a character who symbolizes a certain aspect of American life in his way, as say, Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby or Hemingway's Robert Jordan do in theirs.

Several factors make this an exceptional work. Not the least is the beginning section’s description of the antecedents of the "white trash" phenomena, as exemplified by Dove, that as always been something of a hidden secret about the American experience. In short, what happens when the land runs out, or in Professor Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis-the frontier ends. Nobody has put this in literature better than Algren, even Steinbeck. Furthermore, he has moved the story line here back in time from his usual 1940's and 1950's to the 1930's when some cosmic shifts were occurring in American life.

Algren has also moved the geography from Chicago to New Orleans and integrated some of his short story characters and story lines found in his collection Neon Wilderness into this project. Changes in time, place and characters there may be but that raw struggle for survival for those down almost below the base of society is still the same. The only objection that I have is that the portrait of Linkhorn, as described here by Algren, gives me an impression that old Dove could never ever make it in his `chosen' world unlike, say, Frankie Machine who has that urban grit almost genetically build into him in order to survive. Frankly, I do not believe that Dove could have survived in my old housing project. Frankie Machine would have been the `king of the hill'. Read this valuable book about an America that, then and now, is hidden in the shadows.

The Adventures of Augie March- Saul Bellow's Chicago

BOOK REVIEW

The Adventure of Augie March, Saul Bellows, Penquin Press, New York, 2002

These seem to be Chicago days for this reviewer. He has just done some reviews of Chicago’s Chess Records that essentially defined the sound of the electrified blues in what would be old Augie’s old neighborhood. Furthermore, I have reviewed the work of Chicago’s Nelson Algren who takes more than one look at the downside of Chicago life in the raw - what happens to the Augies when they do not break out of that place between the working poor and the lumpen proletariat. And this is a good place to set up the fundamental difference in Bellow’s take on life as compared to Algrens’s. Both describe lives and milieus that can expose the nasty, short and brutish side of life but unlike Algren’s Frankie Machine in The Man With the Golden Arm Augie is smart (and clean enough) to make the break.

To that extent Bellow’s Augie, his pals and his town are a celebration of the possibilities that the immigrants to this country believed was possible (and on too many occasions were dashed to pieces). A nice little devise that Bellow uses to highlight this contrast is the tension between the career paths of Augie and his brother. Both face the existential crisis of being left to one’s own devices in the world but the brother survives by creating wealth for himself and forgets, in fact scorns, the idea of intellectual reflections about man’s fate. Poor Augie though wants to know the meaning of life once he has finally broken out of the working class milieu- but travel, a rich lady friend and a whole different set of adventures do not satisfy that hunger to know that meaning.

I would argue, and here I go back to Augie’s days as a Trotskyist, that he might have cut against the grain of that modern day sense of self-isolation in a heartless world if he had organized others to create an alternative society where that alienation from productive labor could have been diminished. But, that is just this reviewer pontificating against Bellow’s facile early literary Trotskyism. Although I read this book initially about 25 years ago the first half still is gripping. The second half meanders a little more than I recall from the first reading. This is an early work though. Bellow gets better as a writer later, if not better in resolving humankind’s existential crisis.