Almost too lyrical for its subject matter but still a cult classic.

Morphine addiction, poverty and crime all take center stage in the late 40s right here in my neighborhood (Division and Damen). In fact, if Frankie Machine's apartment were to still exist, it would be a 90 second walk up my street. Algren's own apartment that he lived in for some 15 years, is a three minute walk from where I live. The often beautiful prose tells a relentlessly grim story. I can't say that I was unhappy when it ended. It will be worth re-reading at some point in the future.

This is the tale of Frankie "Machine" Majcinek, a young WWII vet, who becomes a morphine addict after being treated for war injuries. This addiction leads him into one dark corner after another, until he ends up ending it all. Moral of the story? Don't do drugs, or perhaps, don't fight for your country, because it won't fight for you. Not a happy book.

It's rough, it's sloppy, it's poetic, meandering, even--I think--contradictory at one point, and ultimately exquisitely sad and utterly beautiful. Particularly effecting here is the mix of cynicism with vulnerability, making this novel maybe the finest depiction of that human condition in which we're always bleeding and always finding novel ways to stem the blood flow by pretending it doesn't hurt that much, by ridiculing the pain as if we don't feel it at all.

My first Algren, I can't wait to read another. It packs much of the same wallop of a Hubert Selby Jr., a favorite of mine, but with perhaps a less controlled narrative, and, most interestingly, without the ostensibly Christian empathy angle from which Selby created his works. So, either Algren arrived at depicting the naked, suffering human from a purely secular, existentialist angle--logical, it seems to me, as that's pretty much my own philosophical stance and I always fall back on a love of humanity, and particularly useless suffering as our/humanity's most salient characteristic and therefore the greatest beauty of our restlessly self-destructive species--or that he was a Christian beneath his writerly pose.

Speaking of which, I enjoyed the extra essays in this critical edition, especially the personal memoir of John Clellon Holmes, who puts Algren into what we have to figure now is his historical context. As well as bemoaning how short is the shelf life of writing--shorter, sadly, than the lives of most writers. This is why I waited until I was 50 to publish. I wish.

Every bit as amazing as I had heard and easily worth a reread. 300 pages of existential urban poetry and extremely well-rendered characters. The portrait of Chicago Algren paints is dynamic, bleak and brutally honest in every way. This novel lives and breaths like a blackened, hopeless metropolis and I heartily recommend it.

Well, this is just about as bleak as it's possible to get. By and large, the only time when there isn't an overpowering sense of deep enduring misery is when the 1940's Chicago slang becomes entirely incomprehensible. There's little to like in any of the characters; perhaps I'm lacking in knowledge of the area and times, but there doesn't seem to be a desirable trait present anywhere in this book. A proper cast of lowlife petty hoodlums, drunks and junkies. It's not that other books don't feature such characters, it's just that normally there's a sense of possible escape, or sympathy for the character trapped in circumstances they're powerless to escape from. Not here. Every single person seems to be suited to their slum existence, with no motivation to try and escape from the cycle of depression and criminality by... trying to get a job, perhaps?

Still, there's no doubt that Nelson paints a very convincing portrait of the city's inner slums, or of the mindset of its protagonists. It's powerful stuff, but just too lacking in any kind of hope or redemption for humanity to be ranked up there in the top tiers of literature.

3.75 Stars. 5-star writing style, but the story felt a bit overlong and meandering, and the characters were difficult to connect with. I will definitely try something else by Algren.

Algren does successfully portray the "down and out," seedy side of a city's underbelly of drug addiction, gambling, tenement living and petty crime. I found myself silently cheering that Frankie would shake the monkey off his back (Algren originated the saying, supposedly), all the while knowing the cheers were futile wastes of breath. Algren also superbly crafts each character in such a way that you can practically feel them struggling.

But ultimately, I didn't find the book compelling. It just didn't do it for me. The writing is highly stylized and the transitions were sometimes difficult for me to follow. For example, in one paragraph we're following Frankie into his a men-only hotel, and the next we're apparently inside Sophie's mind as she loses it. This may be one of those novels that has to be read in the right time and space, and I just wasn't in it, as it's been compared to Welsh's Trainspotting (or vice versa), which I loved.