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A review by lee_foust
The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
5.0
It's rough, it's sloppy, it's poetic, meandering, even--I think--contradictory at one point, and ultimately exquisitely sad and utterly beautiful. Particularly effecting here is the mix of cynicism with vulnerability, making this novel maybe the finest depiction of that human condition in which we're always bleeding and always finding novel ways to stem the blood flow by pretending it doesn't hurt that much, by ridiculing the pain as if we don't feel it at all.
My first Algren, I can't wait to read another. It packs much of the same wallop of a Hubert Selby Jr., a favorite of mine, but with perhaps a less controlled narrative, and, most interestingly, without the ostensibly Christian empathy angle from which Selby created his works. So, either Algren arrived at depicting the naked, suffering human from a purely secular, existentialist angle--logical, it seems to me, as that's pretty much my own philosophical stance and I always fall back on a love of humanity, and particularly useless suffering as our/humanity's most salient characteristic and therefore the greatest beauty of our restlessly self-destructive species--or that he was a Christian beneath his writerly pose.
Speaking of which, I enjoyed the extra essays in this critical edition, especially the personal memoir of John Clellon Holmes, who puts Algren into what we have to figure now is his historical context. As well as bemoaning how short is the shelf life of writing--shorter, sadly, than the lives of most writers. This is why I waited until I was 50 to publish. I wish.
My first Algren, I can't wait to read another. It packs much of the same wallop of a Hubert Selby Jr., a favorite of mine, but with perhaps a less controlled narrative, and, most interestingly, without the ostensibly Christian empathy angle from which Selby created his works. So, either Algren arrived at depicting the naked, suffering human from a purely secular, existentialist angle--logical, it seems to me, as that's pretty much my own philosophical stance and I always fall back on a love of humanity, and particularly useless suffering as our/humanity's most salient characteristic and therefore the greatest beauty of our restlessly self-destructive species--or that he was a Christian beneath his writerly pose.
Speaking of which, I enjoyed the extra essays in this critical edition, especially the personal memoir of John Clellon Holmes, who puts Algren into what we have to figure now is his historical context. As well as bemoaning how short is the shelf life of writing--shorter, sadly, than the lives of most writers. This is why I waited until I was 50 to publish. I wish.