Customer Reviews

A Walk on the Wild Side: A Novel

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In a perfect world, _A Walk on the Wild Side_ would be remembered as Algren's best book, and would be read in American literature classes.

Algren is a much-needed antidote to both romantics who idealize the poor and to conservatives who feel smugly superior to the lower classes but have no real sense of the difficulties they face.

Its social significance aside, _Walk_ should be read by anyone interested in literary style. Algren's narrative voice--pugnacious, amused, and quietly outraged--explains why Algren has always been read by writers, even if a larger general audience continues to escape him.

(While it is true this novel reworks material from _The Neon Wilderness_, it is put to much better use here--read _Walk_ first!)

Having read the book a long time ago I can't describe particulars, but it remains years later my #1 favorite book of all time. If you enjoy beautifully written stories about not-so-beautiful people, this novel is a must-read. The characters are from society's underbelly, and, while Algren does not glorify them, he makes you feel great empathy for them. Besides presenting you with powerful characters, his use of words is astonishing. I can only describe Algren's language as "raw poetry." His words are poetic while the content is not (as opposed to, say, Henry Miller's language, which is powerful and raw but can't exactly be described as poetic [in my opinion, anyway]). This is simply a beautiful book most people would call you crazy for describing as beautiful.

You are a good person, pay your taxes, honour your parents, do an honest's days work...so nothing in common with whores, drug addicts, boot-lickers, queers, hustlers, drunkards, jail fodder. You are a good honest citizen looking out for others.

Last week I was on a train that got stuck outside of Bristol by the floods for several hours, we moved up and down the tracks and stopped before moving up and down the tracks again. Eventually we returned to Taunton and were dumped at the station. Outside the promised coaches were absent, it was bucketing down rain and no one from the rail company in charge. When coaches did arrive in dribs and drabs 300+ people ran as if fleeing a doomed city. No thoughts given to parents with babes in arms, to elderly passengers struggling with heavy cases. I bet you that we were all good people, who pay our taxes...

In Walk on the Wild Side, Nelson Algren asks "why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

The book was written at the on set of the cold war in the 1950's but is set in the Deep south of the early 1930's. Algren himself went into popular and critical decline soon after in part due to the abuses of McCarthyism and in part to his own hard drinking, gambling and drug taking.

The story starts with Dove a Southern trailer trash illiterate 16 year old in the Mexican-Texas border. His grandfather is traveling preacher...described by Dove as the type that makes you want to throw your Bible away. He is barefoot, and in country yokel jeans. At the end he is in the height of fashion albeit bedraggled due to prison sentence for being drunk and disorderly. Along the way we see the ins and outs of hustling, working in a peepshow, making and selling rubbers etc. We meet the women he loves or has sex with and one who keeps her humanity enough perhaps to love him. This unfolds as he jumps trains to New Orleans and then tries to make a living.

The narrative can at time feel like a series of short stories threaded together but its both naturalistic and funny. See Dove as an innocent abroad who walks where others fear to tread and so sails through danger that passes over his head. It also has lots of little passages of songs scatters throughout the book. Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed is based on the book and was going to be part of a musical of the book- want to see that if it ever happens!

It has to be said it's a flawed masterpiece but still better then many other writers' best work so give it a try and get a sense if you could believe in humanity if crushed at the bottom of the pile.

Country boy Dove Linkhorn, son of Fitz ( hell-fire preacher and cesspool cleaner ),defiler of women, smarter than he looks bum, leaves Texas for New Orleans where he fits right in for a while, with the depression-era cripples, prostitutes, pimps, flimflam artists,and prison-life.

Much of this book is a re-run of Somebody in Boots and Never Come Morning, with modifications. Unlike those books, the prose style is Algren at his most polished. Even so he overdoes it on many occasions where a simple statement would have sufficed. But redeems himself by pretty much avoiding the annoying switch in viewpoint within multiple character scenes that mar his other, otherwise excellent work.

Nelson Algren didn't write all that many books in his long career, a state of affairs that could be condensed into two titles: A Walk on the Wild Side and The Man with the Golden Arm.

This book is about people who have nothing to lose, so they can afford to take chances.

It's funny, sad and provocative. Yes, I know that some parts have been lifted from "Neon Wilderness" but it works for me.

My advice to anyone who's read the book but not seen the movie that's "supposedly" based on this book: DON'T.

You will be disappointed. The story is not the same. It's so different from Algren's book that Algren himself didn't even attend the premiere.

If you haven't read this book and are a fan of stories about marganalized people, then by all means, read it.

It shows the "downtrodden" as complex and real people.

Nelson Algren's novel relates the adventures of Dove Linkhorn, an illiterate young man who leaves poverty and a failed love affair behind him to wander the countryside. He has many adventures along the way until he settles for a time in New Orleans, where he will experience happiness and great tragedy.

Linkhorn is an appealing character, whose desire to better himself makes him easy to sympathize with. The real star of this novel, however, is Algren's prose. Hemingway himself felt that Algren was one of the best writers in America, although their styles couldn't be more different. In contrast to Hemingway's stark, deceptively simple prose, Algren's is full of flourishes and wordplay. I have never encountered a writer that was more adept at breaking my heart and making me laugh out loud on the same page--sometimes in the same paragraph. There are verbal fireworks going off in this book. His characters are extreme types living on the fringe of society, but Algren makes them come alive. Highly recommended.

I was excited to read this, having read an Algren interview in the Paris Review wherein his off-the-cuff stories were more entertaining than most polished fiction (No, I haven't read any other Algren, and, yes, I will). This book was then a great let-down. It is a wash of mildly poetic language, poetic in the sense of being obscure, which obscures the tale of a young man gone to New Orleans to seek his fame and fortune and find his bottle, whores and destruction. I have read stories far more obscured by poetry (Ulysses, The Alexandria Quartet, The Obscene Bird of Night), but the poetics of these works excuse themselves by being a joy in themselves. With this work, the poetics do replicate a boozy, confused New Orleans of one night bleeding into the next, but it is so boring that one constantly tries to look past it to find the story, or simply wants to put down the book. It's a kind of 'Brown Bunny' approach to aesthetics--the form is supposed to justify itself. Your supposed to be disgusted, bored, etc. That means it's effective. To my mind this is a cheap technique and exactly the one Algren employs. The characters are not so much unreal or unenjoyable as inert--they appear, they push the plot in a given direction and then they fade back into the background. Only Dove, the main character, remains, getting tossed about by all these disparate forces. There are whores, fights, pimps, lots of con-men and other stock characters (everyone is trying to get ahead and looking out for themselves, a pure Machivelian world, but no-one even has the sophistication of desire to want anything but bottle, cash or sex)... I don't know, I really wanted to like this book. Algren was a self-made writer, a very respectable human being by all accounts, and not without talent. But this book missed the mark for me. I'll try 'Man with the Golden Arm' when I stop being mad about this one.

As I have mentioned in other reviews of Nelson Algren's work, such as The Man With The Golden Arm, I am personally very familiar with the social milieu that he is working. Growing up in a post-World War II built housing project this reviewer knew first hand the so-called `romance' of drugs, the gun, the ne'er do well hustler and the fallen sister. And I also learned the complex mechanisms one needed to develop in order to survive at that place where the urban working poor meet and mix with the lumpen proletariat- the con men, dopesters, grifters, drifters and gamblers who feed on the downtrodden. This is definitely not the mix that Damon Runyon celebrated in his Guys and Dolls-type stories. Far from it.

Nelson Algren has once again, through hanging around Chicago police stations (does anyone describe that milieu, cops and criminals, better?), other nefarious locales and the sheer ability to observe, gotten that sense of foreboding, despair and the just plain oblivion of America's mean streets down pat. In this, probably his best literary endeavor in that vein, Algren has gotten down to the core of existence for the would be world-beater hustler Dove Linkhorn a character who symbolizes a certain aspect of American life in his way, as say, Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby or Hemingway's Robert Jordan do in theirs.

Several factors make this an exceptional work. Not the least is the beginning section`s description of the antecedents of the "white trash" phenomena, as exemptified by Dove, that as always been something of a hidden secret about the American experience. In short, what happens when the land runs out, or in Professor Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis-the frontier ends. Nobody has put this in literature better than Algren, even Steinbeck. Furthermore, he has moved the story line here back in time from his usual 1940's and 1950's to the 1930's when some cosmic shifts were occurring in American life.

Algren has also moved the geography from Chicago to New Orleans.and integrated some of his short story characters and story lines found in his collection Neon Wilderness into this project. Changes in time, place and characters there may be but that raw struggle for survival for those down almost below the base of society is still the same. The only objection that I have is that the portrait of Linkhorn, as described here by Algren, gives me an impression that old Dove could never ever make it in his `chosen' world unlike, say, Frankie Machine who has that urban grit almost genetically build into him in order to survive. Frankly, I do not believe that Dove could have survived in my old housing project. Frankie Machine would have been the `king of the hill'. Read this valuable book about an America that, then and now, is hidden in the shadows.

I just finished reading Nelson Algren's, "A Walk on the Wild Side," and to quote Ernest Hemingway, "Mr. Algren, boy, you are good." It's been years since I've stuck to a novel the way I did this one. After I got past about page eighty, I couldn't put it down. Algren details the lives of hookers, hustlers and hangers on walking the wild streets of New Orleans in 1930's.
There is more colorful language and colorful characters put down on a page that can be found in the hue of a rainbow. The book asks the question why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost, and why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are some of the most natural believers in humanity while those who have only sought to acquire, to take and take, and never give anything back are the most contemptuous of mankind.
The book, about economic hard time in the 1930's bears an eerie resemblance to the hard times of 2011. In the mixed up time of the 1930's, " ...the number of jobless rose to 8 million, two hundred thousand steelworkers took a 15% wage cut, the D.A.R. demanded that unemployed aliens be deported, a crisis in unemployment relief was imminent, and Huey Long said it was time to redistribute the wealth. The New York City Chamber of Commerce said that Prohibition was failing, the Secretary of Labor pointed out that business was resisting further decline. Self reliance for the penniless and government aid to those who already had more than they could use, was the plan. It was between prostitution and prohibition that the ancient color line was finally breached. Negro bellboys had gained a virtual monopoly on the delivery of illicit alcohol and had found white male guest either wanted a woman with the bottle or a bottle with the woman."
The book is full of charming advice such as the following: "Blow wise to this, friend, never play cards with a man named Doc, never eat at a place called Mom's, never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Life is hard by the yard. But you don't to do it by the yard. By the inch, it's a cinch."
Nelsen Algren wrote this novel in the 1950's, long after it was walked. He says he found his way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific Station where the jukes were playing, "Walking the Wild Side of Life." He lived pretty much on that side most of his life. As I read this book, I couldn't help but be reminded that this was book was written by the man whose heart was broken by his French lover, Simone de Beauvoir. He is feature prominently in her novel, "The Mandarins."

On its own, this might be worth three and a half stars. The problem is that it contains too many segments lifted right out of The Neon Wilderness. Yes, this is true of some of Algren's other works, but it happened in far too many places here. The lack of focus on the main character makes it feel like Algren simply assembled a skeleton to hang together some of his short stories. The reader deserves better.