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Beth Capper 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
Eds. Brooke Horvath and Dan Simon
(Seven Stories Press)
Reviewed by Beth Capper
"I can see no purpose in writing about people who have won everything," Nelson Algren said in an interview in 1957. Algren wrote about vagrants, prostitutes, drug addicts, and others who got shrifted by the system — people who lived and died without anyone knowing they existed at all. Except, of course, for Algren.
At times he literally took the words right out of their mouths, pointing to poetic sensibilities in phrases that would likely pass the rest of us by. This interview, one of few in-depth conversations with Algren from this prolific period in his career, is collected along with a selection of rare and unpublished essays, stories, and poetry in Entrapment and Other Writings.
Chicago is always at the center of things in Algren's work. It is a city he both loved and despised. Algren's capacity for explaining its appeals and pitfalls is perhaps why he is so adored by its residents, and why his word on Chicago has become the final one. His vision of the city is at once romantic and foreboding: its unforgiving winters and its back streets lit by "indifferent stars."
Entrapment is unlikely to become an essential Algren text — the selection is not the writer at his strongest. However, just as the book starts to lull, Algren comes out swinging with prose so shattering that it makes the whole read worthwhile. Some of these pieces run a mere few pages, such as the essay “Ain't Nobody on My Side,” a vitriolic indictment of American consumerism: "Never has any people deodorized, sanitized, germproofed, cellophaned and hygienized itself so thoroughly and still remained with the sense of something dead under the house." Such writing demonstrates that the America Algren canonizes is both nostalgic and ever-present, as though if you scrubbed hard enough at the sidewalk on Chicago's Division Street — now lined with fashionable boutiques, cafes and condos — you might see the scuffed heels of the prostitutes he was so fond of writing about.
The book's title work, “Entrapment,” is an unfinished novel that Algren belabored over until his death that tells the story of a prostitute and heroin addict called Beth-Mary, based upon Algren's affair with his lover Margo. “Entrapment” contains a couple of firsts for Algren: it is his only novel to be written in the first-person — a technique he used for countless stories but never a full length novel — and it is his first written entirely from a female perspective. While Algren can be considered a precursor to Kerouac, his depictions of women, if a little naive, eschew misogyny for complexity and affection. Even though women are bit-players in many of his stories, they are bit-players with their own faces, voices and words. Two long chapters from the novel are excerpted in this collection, both of which are so tantalizing one wishes he had finished it.
By the end of his career, Algren no longer believed his words could "make a dent" and alter people's perceptions. "There is no way of making the slightest impression on the American middle class that there are people who have no alternative, who live in horror, that there are people whose lives are nightmares," he told H.E.F Donaghue in 1964 in the book Conversations with Nelson Algren. And, outside of Chicago, he has mostly fallen into obscurity. It is tragic that for a man as talented as Algren, writing was, for the most part, a thankless undertaking. Perhaps this is the ultimate task of Entrapment — to draw renewed attention to Algren with the hope that he can make a dent yet.