The Man With the Golden Arm

Rating:
Summary: this is one book that takes you all the way there
Review: I don't know how I missed Algren, but I had never heard of him before I picked this book up. I only bought it because of the title. The darker days of my own youth have made me skeptical of books dealing with alcoholism and addiction. They never seem to get it right. This one nails it, seemingly without effort. Unlike other books of the genre, this one does not romanticize the ugliness it deals with. Frankie Machine's life is a tour through poverty, loveless marriages, addictions and hopelessness. It is not exaggerated. This is what it's really like. Algren's realism and intelligence make this one of the finest novels I've ever read. The details are so vivid and accurate that one has to wonder how many demons Algren shares with his characters. The Man With The Golden Arm is simply fiction mirroring life. It presents a side of life that many of its readers will never experience first-hand. Of that, you will be grateful. A combination of poor choices, bad luck, and lack of opportunity has overwhelmed the characters so completely that most of them don't know that they are already dead. I am a writer...this is one of those books that will always keep me humble. For most, their greatest achievement of words will never come close to to Algren's harrowing tome. Do not read this while distracted. It requires your full attention. It's that rich, that brilliant. This is not just a book about morphine, booze & the ghetto....it is a book of suffering, pain, betrayal, neglect & spite. Mr. Algren has been graceful enough to supply the compassion that most of characters seem to lack.

Rating:
Summary: A truly awesome reading experience.
Review: I read this book in 1980 and it still stays in my mind as a great piece of writing. I can't review a lot of the books I read in the past year because I've already forgotten their vapid styles and one-dimensional characters. Algren's style is compelling, exciting and muscular. Frankie Machine is a character whose suffering will engage you. As I said in an anonymous review of this book, white urban poverty and despair has never been portrayed better in a post-war novel. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: No Work and No Play
Review: I think this is one of the best novels ever written. People who say Algren romanticizes the poor have clearly not read the book properly, all he does is say they are human just as you. But describing them as low-lifes like some reviewers did, just shows that Algren's message did not come across. This book is about love for humanity. And that is ALL humanity, not just the part that's nicely educated and has a good job and doesn't rob you at night. One reviewer said that Frankie Machine should of just quit taking drugs and sought himself a nice job and everything would of turned out fine. How? Would Frankie be loved then, would his crippled wife be able to walk, would there be no loneliness and desperation. would it stop raining? Would it stop the El from going round and round? I'm sick and tired of people romanticizin' the rich.

Rating:
Summary: Mighty Morphine Power Ranger
Review: Nelson Algren is dead.

Fortunately, his writing has survived in this nice, ethnic piece of Americana literature. You deal with a drug doing main character Franky the Machine. He's a card dealing depressionist with a maimed wife.

He's living with regret because nothing in his life goes right and it seems like it's all his fault. THis novel put realistic emotion into the consciousness of America. It has a pulse that beats true to the fact that life is not always easy, and being a veteran of war, it seems doubly difficult for nickel-and-dimer Frankie Majacinic, Franky tha machine.

If he could kick morphine maybe he could get out of his emotional doldrum...

Rating:
Summary: Not for emotional wimps
Review: Simply put, this is not the kind of novel one takes lightly. It is a thought provoking, dark, and meaty book that causes the reader to feel and live the desperation of the characters portrayed. The book was written after WWll, and the aftermath of one man's self-medication of a war injury with the morphine (heroin) drug. Looped into the mix is a very complicated marriage based on guilt, her lost hopes and dreams, those that worship the weak, and the weak that worship no one. It is a novel, I think better read several times, for the first time is as if you are numbed by the bleakness of it all, the heaviness and the heartbreak.

This is no novel for emotional wimps.

Rating:
Summary: LIKE A BLOW TO THE SOLAR PLEXUS!
Review: The great Nelson Algren's powerful tale. A work of art. Chicago, down-and-outers struggling with their various demons. One of the finest of all novelists. Algren, as a human being, had heart, wit, intelligence...and it shows. Not many writers today can touch him, although I can think of one or two covering the same turf: trying to make sense out of this insanity called life: Charles Bukowski, George Orwell, Henry Miller, B. Traven (The Cottonpickers), Kirk Alex (Working the Hard Side of the Street), Dan Fante (Chump Change, Spitting Off Tall Buildings) et al. You might want to give N.A's Neon Wilderness a try as well, a terriric short story collection. Algren's books last because his words have meaning to us--and always will.

Rating:
Summary: extraordinary
Review: The Man with the Golden Arm is a beautifully complex tale that explores the experiences of the poor and powerless in mid-century Chicago. Frankie Machine returns to his old neighborhood after a stint in prison, having kicked a heroin habit and dreaming of becoming a drummer in a nightclub band. But all the old opportunities and constraints that worked on him before -- pressing need for cash, his skill as a card dealer, guilt over his wife's disability, temptations of drugs and petty crime -- kick in again, and he is inexorably pulled back into old habits and behaviors he had hoped to resist. Some call this a 'dark' tale, but it isn't really: yes, Frankie and friends are stuck in precarious, marginalized circumstances without real power to change, yet their lives unfold in ways that entertain contradictions that people of all circumstances face, between hope and despair, struggle and defeat, trust and betrayal, compulsion and choice. Algren is a uniquely gifted writer; he takes you inside characters' heads to see their thoughts and dreams (often off-kilter), and their humanity feels real and immediate. This is the edition of the book to buy -- it has wonderful essays about Algren and his work.

Rating:
Summary: Not quite the classic book everyone says it is.
Review: There are two monkeys on Frankie-Machine-Majcinek's back: A morphine addiction acquired in World War Two; and the aftermath of a car accident from which his wife Sophie ( Zosh ) is wheelchair bound. Even so, Frankie is the king of card dealers, a machine in his consistency, and dreams of becoming a big-band drummer like Gene Kruppa, or Dave Tuff. `It's all in the wrist 'n I got the touch', he tells his sidekick Solly- Sparrow-Saltskin, who idolises Frankie till the bitter end.

This is a story of destructive dependence: Frankie is looking for someone other than Zosh or Sparrow; something other than morphine to depend on. He almost finds it from his association, with, bar-girl, Molly Novotny, but has it snatched away by Sparrow's coerced betrayal.

This is a very powerful book, which stands comparison to anything written today. Fans of Iain Banks, Gerald Kersh, or William Gibson should enjoy it.

Rating:
Summary: just say no
Review: This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannottake a punch... Mr Algren can hit with both hands and move around andhe will kill you if you are not awfully careful ... Mr Algren, boy,you are good. -Ernest Hemingway

Frankie Machine is the Man with theGolden Arm. The arm is both a blessing and a curse--on the one hand,it makes him the best stud-poker dealer in Chicago and an aspiring,Gene Krupasque drummer, on the other, it is the vessel he uses toshoot heroin and, ultimately, to accidentally punch and kill hispusher. Thus, there are multiple layers of meaning and irony whenFrankie says: "It's all in the wrist, 'n I got thetouch."

For the most part, this inaugural winner of TheNational Book Award reads like an American take on Victor Hugo's LesMiserables. Like Jean Valjean, Frankie's crimes are relatively minor,his addiction for instance is a result of morphine dependency hedeveloped after being wounded in WWII. He even has his own InspectorJavert in Captain Bednar, who has spent twenty years doing his"honest copper's duty" but is now tormented by guilt, havingcome to believe that the people he has pursued are no more guilty thanhe. But this does not stop him from pursuing Frankie through theseamy underside of Chicago, just as Javert pursued Valjean throughParis.

It is not surprising then that Algren shares Hugo's greatestweakness, that occupational hazard of the Intellectual, a romanticreverence for the poor. Algren's Chicago is an enormous prison, theiron railways that bound the city becoming figurative bars on a cell.And the poverty and squalor that the characters live in creates anoppressive atmosphere from which there is no escape. It is a world weare overly familiar with from such literature, where the junkies werejust unlucky, the hookers have hearts of gold, the murders areaccidents or acts of desperation and the cops who keep order realizein their secret hearts that the "bad guys" are really goodguys. It never ceases to amaze me that writers like Hugo and Algren(and Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and so on) are credited with beingrealistic, humanistic and compassionate. As I've asked before, how domost of us have any idea if their portraits of the poor are realistic?(see Orrin's review of Dog Eat Dog (1996)(Edward Bunker) (Grade: B)).How many critics and academics know any inner city heroin addicts?Why should we believe, as Algren asks us to, that the average junkieis an unwilling victim of life's circumstances? Perhaps the mostunrealistic passages in the book are those where the policeman Bednarsits wringing his hands in anguish at the injustice he perpetrates oncriminals. I'll defer to my sister, who is a prosecutor, and herhusband, who is a cop, but I've known a fair number of law enforcementofficials and none of them resembled Bednar. Your middle class guilttends to get sucked out of you pretty quickly once it comes in contactwith a few lowlifes.

But never mind for now whether Algren's visionof the urban poor is realistic; let's ask instead what his view saysabout humankind. Fundamentally, he espouses a world view wherein thepoor are just like you and me only they got a few bad breaks and nowthey are unable to help themselves because of external forces. Howcan this be the humanist position? In some basic sense, Algren andhis ilk do not believe in Man, in his potential, in his power, in hisambition. Instead, they believe in impersonal forces which govern Manand in Man's essential helplessness in the face of circumstance. Thisstrikes me as anti-human.

As to compassion, one would have thoughtthe day was long since past when anyone believed that it iscompassionate to excuse the pathologies of the underclass and to tryto make them dependents of charitable largesse. But check out thispassage from Russell Banks's intro to a reissue of Algren's novels:

It shouldn't surprise me that Nelson Algren, clearly one of the bestnovelists of his time, is not much read these days. It's the ''killthe messenger'' syndrome, I suppose, for the news that Algren's worksbrings us is not good news: if the world he describes is at all likeour own, then it's not morning in America, and it hasn't been for along, long time. In an Algren novel or story, the only thing thattrickles down to where most folks live is disdain, violence andsometimes, on a good day, benign neglect; racism, greed, sadism andmisogyny are the warp and woof of our social fabric; the workers arenot happy and a lot of them are pregnant teen-agers, have no homes, nofood, no jobs and no prospects for same.

The most important notionhere, though Banks would not recognize it, is that the world Algrendescribes is not at all like our own. We don't sit around blamingother people for our problems and hoping to get hot in a card game.In "our world" people go out every day and work hard andaccept responsibility for their own actions and they make their owngood fortune. If we are all lucky, one day we will look back on theWelfare Reform Act and see it as a seminal moment in our history. Itwill come to be seen as the moment when the ideology of NelsonAlgren's literature was finally put to rest and we, as a society,began to demand once again that people help themselves, instead ofblaming the world for their problems.

The Man with the Golden Arm isa perfectly acceptable example of it's genre, which combinesromanticized visions of the poor with Left Wing polemic, perhapsbetter than most. But at the end of the day, it's hard to avoid theinclination to say, "Frankie should have stopped doing drugs andgotten a real job and none of this would have happened."

GRADE:C