The Last Carousel: Fiction and Reportage

Parts of this review were used in a review of Algren's classic Man With The Golden Arm and of the collection of short stories in The Neon Wilderness. These short stories in the Last Carousel reflect the same milieu that Algren worked in that novel although he has taken some of the stories out of Chicago and some of them are from a later period in the 1960's and 1970's. In a strange sense Algren throughout his literary career was working that same small vein- but what a mother lode he produced. Growing up in a post World War II built housing project this reviewer knew first hand the so-called `romance' of drugs, the gun and the ne'er do well hustler. And also the mechanisms one needed to develop to survive at that place where the urban working poor meet and mix with the lumpen proletariat- the con men, dopesters, grifters drifters and gamblers who feed on the downtrodden. This is definitely not the mix that Damon Runyon celebrated in his Guys and Dolls-type stories. Far from it. Nelson Algren has gotten, through hanging around Chicago police stations and the sheer ability to observe, that sense of foreboding, despair and of the abyss of America's mean streets down pat in a number of works, including this collection of his better stories. Along the way we meet an array of stoolies, cranks, crackpots and nasty brutish people who are more than willing to put obstacles in the way of anyone who gets in their way. But to what end? They lose in the end, and drag others down with them. We, of late, have become rather inured to lumpen stories either of the death and destruction type or of the rehabilitative kind but at the time that these stories were put together in the late 1940's and early 1950's this was something of an eye-opener for those who were not familiar with the seamy side of urban life. The dead end jobs, the constant run-ins with the `authorities' in the person of the police, many times corrupt as well. The dread of going to work, the dread of not going to work, the fear of being victimized and the glee of victimizing. The whole jumbled mix of people with few prospects and fewer dreams. Algren has put it down in writing for all that care to read. These are not pretty stories. And he has centered his stories on the trials and tribulations of gimps, prostitutes and other hustlers. Damn, as much as I knew about the kind of things that Algren was describing these are still gripping stories. And, if the truth were told, you know as well as I do that unfortunately these stories could still be written today. Read Algren if you want to walk on the wild side.

There are some excellent stories (tales of growing up on Chicago's south side in the 19-teens), some very good stories (about bookies, railbirds, and down-on-their luck jockeys), and some mediocre stories (essays from a trip to Viet Nam and stories of pimps and prostitues in Saigon) in this collection. The best pieces made the collection well worth it for me. Algren is one of the most lyrical writers that I've read. Few have written prose that gives me the sense of rhythm and melody in the English language that I get from Algren's best stuff (Toni Morrison comes to mind). My favorite passage in this book, from EVERYTHING INSIDE'S A PENNY -- "My father was a fixer of tools, a fixer of machinery; a fixer of tables gone wobbly and windows that had stuck....Other men wished secretly to be forever drunken. He wished to be forever fixing."