These days I’m deep into THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM by Nelson Algren.
An eon ago characters like junkie-dealer Frankie Machine and his wife Sophie stirred the popular imagination, winning the National Book Award for Algren in 1950. Five years later an Otto Preminger movie starred Frank Sinatra (natch) in the title role; Frankie was nominated but failed to win the best actor Oscar. (It went to Ernest Borgnine for his role in “Marty.”)
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM is a standout of literary realism, a classic that mines the mean streets of Chicago through a Proust processor of observed delights and dangers. What Proust does in the Belle Epoque, Algren does for Division Street, Chicago, in the 1940s. How does the lace curtain move during the night in an apartment kept just this side of chaos by a superintendent named Jailer? Read it in Algren.
Take the Great Sandwich Battle in which unlike so much of modern fiction the mockery is bone-deep, not on the surface, so the effect registers on all the warriors: Vi, Stash and Sparrow sing like an opera rather than prance like a musical, in the latter’s case soon to be as forgotten as the outcome of table games or the content of get-through-the-night conversations, disposable as Poland Spring.
Next: Running for Your Life: Spring Goals
