#nelsonalgren — Public Fediverse posts

The Man with the Golden Arm -- Nelson Algren

I'd place this 1949 novel of gamblers, drug pedlars, and other members of the Chicago white ethnic lumpenproletariat in the direct lineage of midwestern naturalists like Theodore Dreiser and James T Farrell. I was also reminded at times of the sentiment and squalor combinations of Steinbeck and Dickens.

In spite of the work offering neither the "proletarian" radicalism of the early thirties nor the later Popular Frontish CIO Americanism of works like Bell's "Out of this Furnace", "The Man with the Golden Arm" is not an entirely apolitical work. Politics drives the plot towards its conclusion as the protagonist Frankie Machine finds himself doomed by a local election fuelled crackdown on crime. Less overt but perhaps more powerful is the continual theme of assets and social connection always trumping fairness, love , and dreams; even before the police net closes in on Frankie, we know that he will never be able to escape the world of drugs and card hustling, become a drummer, and set up with Molly Novotny because he is a nobody who owns nothing.

I can't say I loved the novel, finding as I did much of the criminal argot dialogue and the urban lyricism tiresome at times, but it stands nevertheless as a useful corrective to those understandings of the postwar USA cast entirely in terms of boom and suburbia.

Sadly, Algren made very little from the Frank Sinatra starring film adaptation.

#Books #TheManWithTheGoldenArm #NelsonAlgren #USLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #20thCenturyLiterature #Chicago #Naturalism