Algren’s Acolytes

 

I learned of Nelson Algren  via two quite different routes:  reading his gritty novel The Man with the Golden Arm; and through Simone de Beauvoir’s roman à clef, Les Mandarins, where she gives a textured portrayal (lightly fictionalized) of their vortex-laden affaire.

 

Algren’s overall arc of life  had its ups and downs -- increasingly, downs -- and in time his work came to be little read.   Jonathan Dee published a perceptive and wide-ranging retrospective of the man in the 15 April 2019 New Yorker (“Street Cred”), noting a certain localized resurgence of interest in this sinewy writer, and reviewing a fine new biography  by Colin Asher.   The article culminates in this summing up:

 

Instead of an audience of millions, then, a steady file  of bright, devoted, flame-tending acolytes.  There are sadder afterlives.