|
|
3.0 out of 5 stars
just say no, Nov 18 2000
This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannottake a punch... Mr Algren can hit with both hands and move around andhe will kill you if you are not awfully careful ... Mr Algren, boy,you are good. -Ernest HemingwayFrankie Machine is the Man with theGolden Arm. The arm is both a blessing and a curse--on the one hand,it makes him the best stud-poker dealer in Chicago and an aspiring,Gene Krupasque drummer, on the other, it is the vessel he uses toshoot heroin and, ultimately, to accidentally punch and kill hispusher. Thus, there are multiple layers of meaning and irony whenFrankie says: "It's all in the wrist, 'n I got thetouch." For the most part, this inaugural winner of TheNational Book Award reads like an American take on Victor Hugo's LesMiserables. Like Jean Valjean, Frankie's crimes are relatively minor,his addiction for instance is a result of morphine dependency hedeveloped after being wounded in WWII. He even has his own InspectorJavert in Captain Bednar, who has spent twenty years doing his"honest copper's duty" but is now tormented by guilt, havingcome to believe that the people he has pursued are no more guilty thanhe. But this does not stop him from pursuing Frankie through theseamy underside of Chicago, just as Javert pursued Valjean throughParis. It is not surprising then that Algren shares Hugo's greatestweakness, that occupational hazard of the Intellectual, a romanticreverence for the poor. Algren's Chicago is an enormous prison, theiron railways that bound the city becoming figurative bars on a cell.And the poverty and squalor that the characters live in creates anoppressive atmosphere from which there is no escape. It is a world weare overly familiar with from such literature, where the junkies werejust unlucky, the hookers have hearts of gold, the murders areaccidents or acts of desperation and the cops who keep order realizein their secret hearts that the "bad guys" are really goodguys. It never ceases to amaze me that writers like Hugo and Algren(and Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and so on) are credited with beingrealistic, humanistic and compassionate. As I've asked before, how domost of us have any idea if their portraits of the poor are realistic?(see Orrin's review of Dog Eat Dog (1996)(Edward Bunker) (Grade: B)).How many critics and academics know any inner city heroin addicts?Why should we believe, as Algren asks us to, that the average junkieis an unwilling victim of life's circumstances? Perhaps the mostunrealistic passages in the book are those where the policeman Bednarsits wringing his hands in anguish at the injustice he perpetrates oncriminals. I'll defer to my sister, who is a prosecutor, and herhusband, who is a cop, but I've known a fair number of law enforcementofficials and none of them resembled Bednar. Your middle class guilttends to get sucked out of you pretty quickly once it comes in contactwith a few lowlifes. But never mind for now whether Algren's visionof the urban poor is realistic; let's ask instead what his view saysabout humankind. Fundamentally, he espouses a world view wherein thepoor are just like you and me only they got a few bad breaks and nowthey are unable to help themselves because of external forces. Howcan this be the humanist position? In some basic sense, Algren andhis ilk do not believe in Man, in his potential, in his power, in hisambition. Instead, they believe in impersonal forces which govern Manand in Man's essential helplessness in the face of circumstance. Thisstrikes me as anti-human. As to compassion, one would have thoughtthe day was long since past when anyone believed that it iscompassionate to excuse the pathologies of the underclass and to tryto make them dependents of charitable largesse. But check out thispassage from Russell Banks's intro to a reissue of Algren's novels: It shouldn't surprise me that Nelson Algren, clearly one of the bestnovelists of his time, is not much read these days. It's the ''killthe messenger'' syndrome, I suppose, for the news that Algren's worksbrings us is not good news: if the world he describes is at all likeour own, then it's not morning in America, and it hasn't been for along, long time. In an Algren novel or story, the only thing thattrickles down to where most folks live is disdain, violence andsometimes, on a good day, benign neglect; racism, greed, sadism andmisogyny are the warp and woof of our social fabric; the workers arenot happy and a lot of them are pregnant teen-agers, have no homes, nofood, no jobs and no prospects for same. The most important notionhere, though Banks would not recognize it, is that the world Algrendescribes is not at all like our own. We don't sit around blamingother people for our problems and hoping to get hot in a card game.In "our world" people go out every day and work hard andaccept responsibility for their own actions and they make their owngood fortune. If we are all lucky, one day we will look back on theWelfare Reform Act and see it as a seminal moment in our history. Itwill come to be seen as the moment when the ideology of NelsonAlgren's literature was finally put to rest and we, as a society,began to demand once again that people help themselves, instead ofblaming the world for their problems. The Man with the Golden Arm isa perfectly acceptable example of it's genre, which combinesromanticized visions of the poor with Left Wing polemic, perhapsbetter than most. But at the end of the day, it's hard to avoid theinclination to say, "Frankie should have stopped doing drugs andgotten a real job and none of this would have happened." GRADE:C
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
 
|
|
|
|
