Algren's masterpiece, 05 Dec 2008
This is a fantastic novel by one of the greatest American writers of the last century. An unflinching, sometimes harrowing portrayal of a doomed drifter and the low life characters he finds himself rubbing shoulders with in a New Orleans brothel.

Algren, like his French equivalents Celine and Zola, manages to inhabit a world of impoverished dreamers and losers, holding up a cracked mirror to their tragic lives without ever patronising or judging them. Instead he depicts them as real people trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair, people who dream of something better despite having been damned to a lifetime of anything but. People who dare to hope in the face of inevitabilities older than the ground they walk on, setting themselves up for tragic endings they see coming from a mile off.

This was Algren's gift and that is why this is a great book.

Style Suffocates Substance, 08 Mar 2002
It's not often that a novel washes over you so completely that you cease to care about what's going on, but Nelson Algren pulls off this difficult anti-feat. A picaresque tale of the 'adventures' of a young southern pauper on the road to maturity, it is told in a ponderous, plodding style that strives for prose-poetry but ends up as patronizing guff. Algren is at one remove from his characters, staring at them like a biologist eyeing microbes through a lens, with the fatal result that we, the readers, don't connect with them. To be honest, it was a relief to finish this book; if you want to see this genre properly served, check out Charles Bukowski, or John and Dan Fante.

Algren's masterpiece, 05 Dec 2008
This is a fantastic novel by one of the greatest American writers of the last century. An unflinching, sometimes harrowing portrayal of a doomed drifter and the low life characters he finds himself rubbing shoulders with in a New Orleans brothel.

Algren, like his French equivalents Celine and Zola, manages to inhabit a world of impoverished dreamers and losers, holding up a cracked mirror to their tragic lives without ever patronising or judging them. Instead he depicts them as real people trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair, people who dream of something better despite having been damned to a lifetime of anything but. People who dare to hope in the face of inevitabilities older than the ground they walk on, setting themselves up for tragic endings they see coming from a mile off.

This was Algren's gift and that is why this is a great book.

Style Suffocates Substance, 08 Mar 2002
It's not often that a novel washes over you so completely that you cease to care about what's going on, but Nelson Algren pulls off this difficult anti-feat. A picaresque tale of the 'adventures' of a young southern pauper on the road to maturity, it is told in a ponderous, plodding style that strives for prose-poetry but ends up as patronizing guff. Algren is at one remove from his characters, staring at them like a biologist eyeing microbes through a lens, with the fatal result that we, the readers, don't connect with them. To be honest, it was a relief to finish this book; if you want to see this genre properly served, check out Charles Bukowski, or John and Dan Fante.

Stunning, poignant and breath taking, 02 Jan 2007
This is an amazing book. It is sad and humane while being cruel and apathetic. Algren is an astounding writer with an eye for detail that is so vivid and involving that the reader is part of the story very quickly. It is, as one other reviewer noted, not easy to follow in places, but don't let that put you off this exhilaratingly rich book.

A very rough diamond indeed., 19 Mar 2000
There are two monkeys on Frankie-Machine-Majcinek's back: A morphine addiction acquired in World War Two; and the aftermath of a car accident from which his wife Sophie ( Zosh ) is wheelchair bound. Even so, Frankie is the king of card dealers, a machine in his consistency, and dreams of becoming a big-band drummer like Gene Kruppa, or Dave Tuff. 'It's all in the wrist 'n I got the touch'- he tells his sidekick Solly- Sparrow-Saltskin, who idolises Frankie till the bitter end.

The story opens with Frankie and Sparrow being sent to jail for the night as vagrants, and we learn of Frankie and Sparrow's relationship with the law, and how their own came about. After their release, Frankie and Sparrow go their separate ways, with Frankie going home, reluctantly, to Zosh. In their tiny rented room, Zosh lays into Frankie about him getting her a dog - 'a little puppy pup' - to keep her company when he's not around like he should be to care for the cripple he created. For it's all Frankie's fault: 'her fatal accident' His fault that she has to endure life like the never ending El-Trains on their endless, round-and-round, going nowhere, travels. She could've been out dancing, having a good time; if only she'd listened to her father. But she hadn't. Frankie lets her rip: he's done his best; he's sorry for the accident, but what more can he do. They've been to the doctors who say there isn't anything physically wrong; and the quacks, like Big Boy. From Frankie's point of view, it's only a matter of her wanting to get out of the wheelchair, she should be able to, but it's as if she'd rather cut her own legs off to spite him from it. So Frankie makes his escape to the bar below, the Tug and Maul, where he intends to score a hit of morphine from Nifty Louie and have Sparrow get him a dog, legit, or by dog-napping.

This is a story of destructive dependence: Frankie is looking for someone other than Zosh or Sparrow, something other than morphine to depend on, and almost finds it from his association, with Molly Novotny. But he has it snatched away by Sparrow's coerced betrayal to the police of his panic-driven killing of Nifty Louie. As for Zosh. When Frankie narrowly dodges the police come to arrest him, and she subsequently learns that he's been cheating on her with Molly Novotny, two floors down, in the same rooming house, she finally cracks up and ends up in an institution. Frankie, trying to evade the police decides to hang himself in a hotel room, saying to himself, 'Have a good dream you're dancin', Zosh'.

The first hundred and ten pages of this book are an absolute pain-in-the-butt, not because of the overall nature of the contents, but in the way the contents are arranged, along with rapid changes in viewpoint, and a heavy handedness in the application of humour, simile, and metaphor. The overuse of humour tends to dilute the characters' credibility and sometimes makes them appear ludicrous instead of simply idiosyncratic. As for simile and metaphor, these two devices tend to stretch a scene beyond its natural length, create needless repetition, or in some cases, introduce an air of unlikely thinking with respect to the characters' point of view; it becoming more the author's point of view superimposed, which can come across as soap-boxing or a spot of champagne socialism. Something Nelson Algren didn't intend - I think. All of this could have been avoided by interleaving the various sections and applying some judicious pruning. But it wasn't. So this very fine piece of work, which could be just as popular as books by Iain Banks or William Gibson, will be relegated to being a literary curiosity instead of the popular masterpiece it should be, and for the aforementioned reasons, as opposed to those proposed by James R. Giles.

Even so this is a brilliant book well worth the effort. Also read Gerald Kersh's, Night and the City.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM ( Copyright - 1947. The Modern Poetry Association.)

It's all in the wrist, with the deck or a cue, And Frankie Machine had the touch. He had the touch, and a golden arm - "Hold up, Arm," he would plead, kissing the rosary once for help With the faders sweating it out and - Zing! - there it was - Little Joe or Eighter from Decatur, Double trey the hard way, dice be nice, When you got a hunch bet a bunch, It don't mean a thing if it don't cross that string, Make me five to keep me alive, Tell 'em where you got it 'n how easy it was - We remember Frankie Machine And the arm that always held up. We remember in the morning light When the cards are boxed and the long cues racked Straight up and down like the all-night hours With the hot rush hours past

For it's all in the wrist with the deck or a cue And if he crapped out when we thought he was due It must have been that the dice were rolled, For he had the touch, and his arm was gold: Rack up his cue, leave the steerer his hat, The arm that held up has failed at last.

Yet why does the light down the dealer's slot Sift soft as light in a troubled dream? ( A dream, they say, of a golden arm That belonged to the dealer we called Machine.)

NELSON ALGREN 1909 -1981

It never counts, 05 Jun 1999
I ask people if they've read a certain book, and often they'll ask "does it count if I saw the movie?" I tell them it never counts; in the case of the Man With The Golden Arm, you should have to read the book twice to make up for it.

I believe it was Hemingway who said of Algren, "don't read him if you can't take a punch." This is a powerful book, definitely not for everyone. If you like it, though, give Don Carpenter a try as well (another tragically underappreciated writer),

Modern Tragedy, 09 Jun 1998
The film is better known yet far inferior to the book. This is a genuinely heart breaking, yet unsentimental, tale of social and personal dereliction and decay. A timeless evocation of the inner city, its victims and survivors.

Algren's masterpiece, 05 Dec 2008
This is a fantastic novel by one of the greatest American writers of the last century. An unflinching, sometimes harrowing portrayal of a doomed drifter and the low life characters he finds himself rubbing shoulders with in a New Orleans brothel.

Algren, like his French equivalents Celine and Zola, manages to inhabit a world of impoverished dreamers and losers, holding up a cracked mirror to their tragic lives without ever patronising or judging them. Instead he depicts them as real people trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair, people who dream of something better despite having been damned to a lifetime of anything but. People who dare to hope in the face of inevitabilities older than the ground they walk on, setting themselves up for tragic endings they see coming from a mile off.

This was Algren's gift and that is why this is a great book.

Style Suffocates Substance, 08 Mar 2002
It's not often that a novel washes over you so completely that you cease to care about what's going on, but Nelson Algren pulls off this difficult anti-feat. A picaresque tale of the 'adventures' of a young southern pauper on the road to maturity, it is told in a ponderous, plodding style that strives for prose-poetry but ends up as patronizing guff. Algren is at one remove from his characters, staring at them like a biologist eyeing microbes through a lens, with the fatal result that we, the readers, don't connect with them. To be honest, it was a relief to finish this book; if you want to see this genre properly served, check out Charles Bukowski, or John and Dan Fante.

Stunning, poignant and breath taking, 02 Jan 2007
This is an amazing book. It is sad and humane while being cruel and apathetic. Algren is an astounding writer with an eye for detail that is so vivid and involving that the reader is part of the story very quickly. It is, as one other reviewer noted, not easy to follow in places, but don't let that put you off this exhilaratingly rich book.

A very rough diamond indeed., 19 Mar 2000
There are two monkeys on Frankie-Machine-Majcinek's back: A morphine addiction acquired in World War Two; and the aftermath of a car accident from which his wife Sophie ( Zosh ) is wheelchair bound. Even so, Frankie is the king of card dealers, a machine in his consistency, and dreams of becoming a big-band drummer like Gene Kruppa, or Dave Tuff. 'It's all in the wrist 'n I got the touch'- he tells his sidekick Solly- Sparrow-Saltskin, who idolises Frankie till the bitter end.

The story opens with Frankie and Sparrow being sent to jail for the night as vagrants, and we learn of Frankie and Sparrow's relationship with the law, and how their own came about. After their release, Frankie and Sparrow go their separate ways, with Frankie going home, reluctantly, to Zosh. In their tiny rented room, Zosh lays into Frankie about him getting her a dog - 'a little puppy pup' - to keep her company when he's not around like he should be to care for the cripple he created. For it's all Frankie's fault: 'her fatal accident' His fault that she has to endure life like the never ending El-Trains on their endless, round-and-round, going nowhere, travels. She could've been out dancing, having a good time; if only she'd listened to her father. But she hadn't. Frankie lets her rip: he's done his best; he's sorry for the accident, but what more can he do. They've been to the doctors who say there isn't anything physically wrong; and the quacks, like Big Boy. From Frankie's point of view, it's only a matter of her wanting to get out of the wheelchair, she should be able to, but it's as if she'd rather cut her own legs off to spite him from it. So Frankie makes his escape to the bar below, the Tug and Maul, where he intends to score a hit of morphine from Nifty Louie and have Sparrow get him a dog, legit, or by dog-napping.

This is a story of destructive dependence: Frankie is looking for someone other than Zosh or Sparrow, something other than morphine to depend on, and almost finds it from his association, with Molly Novotny. But he has it snatched away by Sparrow's coerced betrayal to the police of his panic-driven killing of Nifty Louie. As for Zosh. When Frankie narrowly dodges the police come to arrest him, and she subsequently learns that he's been cheating on her with Molly Novotny, two floors down, in the same rooming house, she finally cracks up and ends up in an institution. Frankie, trying to evade the police decides to hang himself in a hotel room, saying to himself, 'Have a good dream you're dancin', Zosh'.

The first hundred and ten pages of this book are an absolute pain-in-the-butt, not because of the overall nature of the contents, but in the way the contents are arranged, along with rapid changes in viewpoint, and a heavy handedness in the application of humour, simile, and metaphor. The overuse of humour tends to dilute the characters' credibility and sometimes makes them appear ludicrous instead of simply idiosyncratic. As for simile and metaphor, these two devices tend to stretch a scene beyond its natural length, create needless repetition, or in some cases, introduce an air of unlikely thinking with respect to the characters' point of view; it becoming more the author's point of view superimposed, which can come across as soap-boxing or a spot of champagne socialism. Something Nelson Algren didn't intend - I think. All of this could have been avoided by interleaving the various sections and applying some judicious pruning. But it wasn't. So this very fine piece of work, which could be just as popular as books by Iain Banks or William Gibson, will be relegated to being a literary curiosity instead of the popular masterpiece it should be, and for the aforementioned reasons, as opposed to those proposed by James R. Giles.

Even so this is a brilliant book well worth the effort. Also read Gerald Kersh's, Night and the City.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM ( Copyright - 1947. The Modern Poetry Association.)

It's all in the wrist, with the deck or a cue, And Frankie Machine had the touch. He had the touch, and a golden arm - "Hold up, Arm," he would plead, kissing the rosary once for help With the faders sweating it out and - Zing! - there it was - Little Joe or Eighter from Decatur, Double trey the hard way, dice be nice, When you got a hunch bet a bunch, It don't mean a thing if it don't cross that string, Make me five to keep me alive, Tell 'em where you got it 'n how easy it was - We remember Frankie Machine And the arm that always held up. We remember in the morning light When the cards are boxed and the long cues racked Straight up and down like the all-night hours With the hot rush hours past

For it's all in the wrist with the deck or a cue And if he crapped out when we thought he was due It must have been that the dice were rolled, For he had the touch, and his arm was gold: Rack up his cue, leave the steerer his hat, The arm that held up has failed at last.

Yet why does the light down the dealer's slot Sift soft as light in a troubled dream? ( A dream, they say, of a golden arm That belonged to the dealer we called Machine.)

NELSON ALGREN 1909 -1981

It never counts, 05 Jun 1999
I ask people if they've read a certain book, and often they'll ask "does it count if I saw the movie?" I tell them it never counts; in the case of the Man With The Golden Arm, you should have to read the book twice to make up for it.

I believe it was Hemingway who said of Algren, "don't read him if you can't take a punch." This is a powerful book, definitely not for everyone. If you like it, though, give Don Carpenter a try as well (another tragically underappreciated writer),

Modern Tragedy, 09 Jun 1998
The film is better known yet far inferior to the book. This is a genuinely heart breaking, yet unsentimental, tale of social and personal dereliction and decay. A timeless evocation of the inner city, its victims and survivors.

Nelson Algren, the voice of the dispossesed., 27 Aug 1999
Any writer can create a sympathetic character and maintain the reader's sympathy throughout a work. A good writer can create an unsympathetic character that gains our sympathy in the course of a story. But a truly great writer creates a very real character that has our sympathy at first, who then completely loses it, only to regain it at the end. This is what Nelson Algren excels at - the characters in Never Come Morning may not be like the people you know, but they exist in the real world as much as they live in Algren's Chicago. They are not perfect, in fact they are all too human--greedy, lustful, and stupid--products of an environment that does not forgive human nature. It is a compelling story that seems more powerful, more modern, more realistic than anything written in the last 20 years. Algren's prose combines the power of a heavyweight's best right hand with the meticulous detail of a fine tailored suit. Once you've read Algren, you will never read anything the same way again.

Algren's masterpiece, 05 Dec 2008
This is a fantastic novel by one of the greatest American writers of the last century. An unflinching, sometimes harrowing portrayal of a doomed drifter and the low life characters he finds himself rubbing shoulders with in a New Orleans brothel.

Algren, like his French equivalents Celine and Zola, manages to inhabit a world of impoverished dreamers and losers, holding up a cracked mirror to their tragic lives without ever patronising or judging them. Instead he depicts them as real people trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair, people who dream of something better despite having been damned to a lifetime of anything but. People who dare to hope in the face of inevitabilities older than the ground they walk on, setting themselves up for tragic endings they see coming from a mile off.

This was Algren's gift and that is why this is a great book.

Style Suffocates Substance, 08 Mar 2002
It's not often that a novel washes over you so completely that you cease to care about what's going on, but Nelson Algren pulls off this difficult anti-feat. A picaresque tale of the 'adventures' of a young southern pauper on the road to maturity, it is told in a ponderous, plodding style that strives for prose-poetry but ends up as patronizing guff. Algren is at one remove from his characters, staring at them like a biologist eyeing microbes through a lens, with the fatal result that we, the readers, don't connect with them. To be honest, it was a relief to finish this book; if you want to see this genre properly served, check out Charles Bukowski, or John and Dan Fante.

Stunning, poignant and breath taking, 02 Jan 2007
This is an amazing book. It is sad and humane while being cruel and apathetic. Algren is an astounding writer with an eye for detail that is so vivid and involving that the reader is part of the story very quickly. It is, as one other reviewer noted, not easy to follow in places, but don't let that put you off this exhilaratingly rich book.

A very rough diamond indeed., 19 Mar 2000
There are two monkeys on Frankie-Machine-Majcinek's back: A morphine addiction acquired in World War Two; and the aftermath of a car accident from which his wife Sophie ( Zosh ) is wheelchair bound. Even so, Frankie is the king of card dealers, a machine in his consistency, and dreams of becoming a big-band drummer like Gene Kruppa, or Dave Tuff. 'It's all in the wrist 'n I got the touch'- he tells his sidekick Solly- Sparrow-Saltskin, who idolises Frankie till the bitter end.

The story opens with Frankie and Sparrow being sent to jail for the night as vagrants, and we learn of Frankie and Sparrow's relationship with the law, and how their own came about. After their release, Frankie and Sparrow go their separate ways, with Frankie going home, reluctantly, to Zosh. In their tiny rented room, Zosh lays into Frankie about him getting her a dog - 'a little puppy pup' - to keep her company when he's not around like he should be to care for the cripple he created. For it's all Frankie's fault: 'her fatal accident' His fault that she has to endure life like the never ending El-Trains on their endless, round-and-round, going nowhere, travels. She could've been out dancing, having a good time; if only she'd listened to her father. But she hadn't. Frankie lets her rip: he's done his best; he's sorry for the accident, but what more can he do. They've been to the doctors who say there isn't anything physically wrong; and the quacks, like Big Boy. From Frankie's point of view, it's only a matter of her wanting to get out of the wheelchair, she should be able to, but it's as if she'd rather cut her own legs off to spite him from it. So Frankie makes his escape to the bar below, the Tug and Maul, where he intends to score a hit of morphine from Nifty Louie and have Sparrow get him a dog, legit, or by dog-napping.

This is a story of destructive dependence: Frankie is looking for someone other than Zosh or Sparrow, something other than morphine to depend on, and almost finds it from his association, with Molly Novotny. But he has it snatched away by Sparrow's coerced betrayal to the police of his panic-driven killing of Nifty Louie. As for Zosh. When Frankie narrowly dodges the police come to arrest him, and she subsequently learns that he's been cheating on her with Molly Novotny, two floors down, in the same rooming house, she finally cracks up and ends up in an institution. Frankie, trying to evade the police decides to hang himself in a hotel room, saying to himself, 'Have a good dream you're dancin', Zosh'.

The first hundred and ten pages of this book are an absolute pain-in-the-butt, not because of the overall nature of the contents, but in the way the contents are arranged, along with rapid changes in viewpoint, and a heavy handedness in the application of humour, simile, and metaphor. The overuse of humour tends to dilute the characters' credibility and sometimes makes them appear ludicrous instead of simply idiosyncratic. As for simile and metaphor, these two devices tend to stretch a scene beyond its natural length, create needless repetition, or in some cases, introduce an air of unlikely thinking with respect to the characters' point of view; it becoming more the author's point of view superimposed, which can come across as soap-boxing or a spot of champagne socialism. Something Nelson Algren didn't intend - I think. All of this could have been avoided by interleaving the various sections and applying some judicious pruning. But it wasn't. So this very fine piece of work, which could be just as popular as books by Iain Banks or William Gibson, will be relegated to being a literary curiosity instead of the popular masterpiece it should be, and for the aforementioned reasons, as opposed to those proposed by James R. Giles.

Even so this is a brilliant book well worth the effort. Also read Gerald Kersh's, Night and the City.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM ( Copyright - 1947. The Modern Poetry Association.)

It's all in the wrist, with the deck or a cue, And Frankie Machine had the touch. He had the touch, and a golden arm - "Hold up, Arm," he would plead, kissing the rosary once for help With the faders sweating it out and - Zing! - there it was - Little Joe or Eighter from Decatur, Double trey the hard way, dice be nice, When you got a hunch bet a bunch, It don't mean a thing if it don't cross that string, Make me five to keep me alive, Tell 'em where you got it 'n how easy it was - We remember Frankie Machine And the arm that always held up. We remember in the morning light When the cards are boxed and the long cues racked Straight up and down like the all-night hours With the hot rush hours past

For it's all in the wrist with the deck or a cue And if he crapped out when we thought he was due It must have been that the dice were rolled, For he had the touch, and his arm was gold: Rack up his cue, leave the steerer his hat, The arm that held up has failed at last.

Yet why does the light down the dealer's slot Sift soft as light in a troubled dream? ( A dream, they say, of a golden arm That belonged to the dealer we called Machine.)

NELSON ALGREN 1909 -1981

It never counts, 05 Jun 1999
I ask people if they've read a certain book, and often they'll ask "does it count if I saw the movie?" I tell them it never counts; in the case of the Man With The Golden Arm, you should have to read the book twice to make up for it.

I believe it was Hemingway who said of Algren, "don't read him if you can't take a punch." This is a powerful book, definitely not for everyone. If you like it, though, give Don Carpenter a try as well (another tragically underappreciated writer),

Modern Tragedy, 09 Jun 1998
The film is better known yet far inferior to the book. This is a genuinely heart breaking, yet unsentimental, tale of social and personal dereliction and decay. A timeless evocation of the inner city, its victims and survivors.

Nelson Algren, the voice of the dispossesed., 27 Aug 1999
Any writer can create a sympathetic character and maintain the reader's sympathy throughout a work. A good writer can create an unsympathetic character that gains our sympathy in the course of a story. But a truly great writer creates a very real character that has our sympathy at first, who then completely loses it, only to regain it at the end. This is what Nelson Algren excels at - the characters in Never Come Morning may not be like the people you know, but they exist in the real world as much as they live in Algren's Chicago. They are not perfect, in fact they are all too human--greedy, lustful, and stupid--products of an environment that does not forgive human nature. It is a compelling story that seems more powerful, more modern, more realistic than anything written in the last 20 years. Algren's prose combines the power of a heavyweight's best right hand with the meticulous detail of a fine tailored suit. Once you've read Algren, you will never read anything the same way again.

Stories of stickmen, pugs, outlaws and other misfits, 16 May 2006
The Neon Wilderness is as a collection of the short stories Algren wrote in the beginning of his career. It was published in 1947, almost 60 years ago, but is still a real, bleak and oddly funny portrayal of the downtrodden and beat.

This edition also features an afterword by Studs Terkel and an Interview with Nelson Algren.