Customer Reviews
Algren's masterpiece - By: M. Keane, 05 Dec 2008 
This is a fantastic novel by one of the greatest American writers of the last century. An unflinching, sometimes harrowing portrayal of a doomed drifter & the low life characters he finds himself rubbing shoulders within a New Orleans brothel.
Algren, like his French equivalents Celine & Zola, manages to inhabit a world of impoverished dreamers & losers, holding up a cracked mirror to their tragic lives without ever patronising or judging them. Instead he depicts them as real people trappedin a cycle of poverty & despair, people who dream of something better despite having been damned to a lifetime of anything but. People who dare to hopein the face of inevitabilities older than the ground they walk on, setting themselves up for tragic endings they see coming from a mile off.
This was Algren's gift & that is why this is a great book.
Style Suffocates Substance - By: , 08 Mar 2002 
It's not often that a novel washes over you so completely that you cease to care about what's going on, but Nelson Algren pulls off this difficult anti-feat. A picaresque tale of the 'adventures' of a young southern pauper on the road to maturity, it is toldin a ponderous, plodding style that strives for prose-poetry but ends up as patronizing guff. Algren is at one remove from his characters, staring at them like a biologist eyeing microbes through a lens, with the fatal result that we, the readers, don't connect with them. To be honest, it was a relief to finish this book; if you want to see this genre properly served, check out Charles Bukowski, or John & Dan Fante.
