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Gretchen Kalwinski on Nelson Algren's
Entrapment and Other Writings : An online exclusive
An online exclusive
(Seven Stories Press)
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Entrapment and Other Writings
By Nelson Algren
(Seven Stories Press)
Reviewed by Gretchen Kalwinski
Lefty writer Nelson Algren never escaped his outsider reputation, even despite winning the first National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm, followed by the adaptation into a film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Frank Sinatra. But then, Algren’s work — which travels the terrain of (mostly-Chicago) prostitutes, bookies, pimps, and junkies — isn’t an easy sell. Even Studs Terkel called Algren’s work “just too gritty” for a mass audience. (Terkel’s quote about grit can be found here, on Wisconsin Public Radio.)
In their introduction to Entrapment and Other Writings, editors Brooke Horvath and Dan Simon say Algren blew his whistle for “the kind of people taken in yesterday by the sub-prime mortgage scam that has today put them out on the street” and as a result of his nonconformist scribblings, his FBI file became thicker than any other American writer [we have to check on this], his vast achievement overshadowed by “his personal disappointments in love and literature.”
Because of his legendary women-problems, and because he wrote mostly from a male point of view, it’s of note that most of Entrapment — his unpublished, unfinished novel excerpted here — is narrated primarily (and compellingly) by junkie-prostitute Beth-Mary. Algren’s tormented love affair with French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir ended when she abandoned him for Sartre and France; it was followed by a relationship with a young junkie-prostitute named Margo — who also abandoned him. This is telling when we read Entrapment’s fragment about a man deserted by his lover; “He’d never desire a coy girl, a demure girl, a good girl, a nice girl again. … How could I get to forty-four thinking they were the good kind?”
Aside from the Entrapment excerpt, the collection includes previously unpublished material from Golden Arm; two new stories “Forgive Them, Lord” and the spectacular “The Lightless Room” about a boxer’s death; “No More Whorehouses,” where he calls NYC mayor Ed Koch a “chicken-head”; “Do It the Hard Way,” which challenges writers to “permit neither avarice nor shame to modify what they truly feel,” plus other short fiction and nonfiction.
These short works are a solid survey of Algren’s still-vibrant writing, but contemporary readers may stumble on the Entrapment passages where he uses a noir-ish, “daddy-o” jazz-language to render period-specific street poetry to an almost-goofy affect. For example, when defending her pimp “Little Daddy,” Beth-Mary notes, “He may not be the best macker there is. But he is the meanest little old dog of a Daddy in town.” One has to believe passages like this — if the manuscript were ever to be sent out for publication — would be ripe for editorial intervention; they sound not “authentic” but like a drippy pulp novel or SNL skit.
But the attempt is admirable and the ideas relevant as ever. Today’s Chicago has the nation’s highest sales tax, an Olympic bid promising to further clean taxpayer’s pockets, quadrupled parking-meter rates, and in Algren’s formerly working-class Wicker Park, iPod-shuffling condo-owners flip-flop to boutiques to slap down $300 for denim. (Urban underbellyies thrive; just not necessarily in Algren’s old digs.) And readers will still find lyrical gems like this one in “Ain’t Nobody on my Side?” in which Algren bah-humbugs the missile race compared with the plight of a penniless girl arrested for narcotics: “They tell me…the nation whose flag is first planted in the moon will inherit the earth. Yet I feel the race is not for the skies, but for the hearts of men. Not amidst meteorite and star, but in those forests of furnished rooms behind the billboards… when the innocent man must prove his innocence or stand convicted on the word of an unseen accuser, though we own the moon, we are lost.”
Passages like these remind us why we read Algren; more than that, why we need him. And why the true outsiders are those on the other side of the fence.