First of all, I'm going to appear on Rick Kogan's The Sunday Papers, a lively live radio show on WGN 720AM which has a huge reach both in the air on the Internet. We begin at what is for me an impossibly early hour, 6:30 am Central time. I'm going to be talking about the issue of TriQuarterly I guest-edited, and making some summer reading recommendations. Rick is a great guy. Knowledgeable and insightful, and intense yet relaxed. Warm, baby. Passionate and funny and caring.
And speaking of good guys, I reviewed Chicago writer Billy Lombardo's new book, How to Hold a Woman for Chicago Public Radio, on Eight-Forty-Eight. What joy. Here's the audio link:
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=34979
And here's the review for you readers. But I have to say, the audio is splendid.
How to Hold a Woman by Billy Lombardo.
Reviewed for Eight-Forty-Eight on Chicago Public Radio by Donna Seaman
Broadcast June 19, 2009
Give it to me slant, say some. While many readers prefer straight-ahead, point A to point B plots, other are bored by linear storylines and search for fiction that takes a more covert approach. It’s a curious thing that nearly everyone accepts all kinds of fractured timelines, abrupt relocations, and narrative gaps in movies, but when fiction is structured this way, objections are raised, and the dreaded word “experimental” is waved about like a cautionary flag. Personally, I love fiction that rides like a car on a winding road. One that passes through deep shadows into the crystal light, then back into the cool, mysterious dark, and out again into the warm sun, each emergence revealing a new vista. This is why I love the hybrid literary form known rather clumsily as a novel-in-stories.
Some examples of this form: Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge. Chicago writer Stuart Dybek is a seminal artist in the novel-in-stories mode. He is also a clear influence on Chicago writer Billy Lombardo. Like his first book, Lombardo’s second, How to Hold a Woman, delivers scenes that involve young characters: precocious 12-year-old Isabel and her symbiotically entwined brothers, Dex, 8, and Sammy, 4. But How to Hold a Woman is about a marriage under siege.
It begins with a charming, if loaded story, or chapter, titled “At Khyber Pass (August 2002).” Alan Taylor has just landed at O’Hare Airport, home from observing ring-tailed lemurs in Madagascar, and he’s looking for his wife, Audrey, and their three children. But only two kids are in the car, and the thing is, we never see the family whole. Sammy jabbers about baseball; sexual tension builds between the too-long-apart adults as they stop at a restaurant for dinner; they all tell Alan about how the kids got lost at a festival in Evanston, and Isabel reveals her utter enthrallment to The Great Gatsby. The curtain closes. The next story takes place two years later. Things have changed. Its breakfast time and Alan is trying to make light of Audrey’s silent rage.
The third story, set two years later, is told from Audrey’s point of view. She still teaches English, but Alan is no longer an animal behavior research scientist. He’s a lawyer working for the Chicago Police. Why did he change careers? Audrey takes measure of her body, as though neither she nor anyone else has appreciated it in a long time. This is when we learn that the family has suffered a tragedy. Audrey is grieving.
Lombardo’s novel-in-stories is breathtakingly concise. A book in which what isn’t said exerts a powerful pressure, like the dark matter of the universe. The dialogue is crisp, combative. The body language is almost ritualized in its gestures. One day, Audrey and Dex stop to peer through the window of a dance studio, where children spin like perfect little automatons, a perfect embodiment of the family’s mode of survival, while on the streets menace pervades. A backpack is stolen. A man falls from a building. Danger and death lurk around every corner.
But this is not a grim book, nor is it a soaper. There is humor here, especially in scenes featuring Sammy and Dex, who crack each other up and drive each other crazy over swearing and the misheard words of a Jethro Tull song. This is a sexy book about married love, about sex as an affirmation of life. Billy Lombardo’s How to Hold a Woman also conveys an exquisitely sensitive vision of unexpected beauty and connection, most remarkably in the story “The White Rose of Chicago,” in which an entire world of pain, sympathy, strength, and grace unfolds within the confines of a Clark Street bus. It’s amazing how many insights into the dynamics of marriage and family Lombardo fits into this supple novel-in-stories, this nuanced mosaic of shattered lives gently reassembled, and newly treasured.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Kudos to 'lit fest' panelists and a radio interview
Terrific fiction panels last weekend at the Printers Row Lit Fest here in cold and rainy Chicago. Big thanks to three tremendous Chicago writers: Joe Meno, Billy Lombardo, and Peter Ferry. Read their books: Peter's marvelous puzzle-box novel, Travel Writing. Joe's latest and most profound and beautiful yet, The Great Perhaps, and Billy's exquisite second book, How to Hold a Woman. I also had the thrill of speaking with bestselling novelist Arthur Phillips and the literary provocateur turned novelist Ben Greenman. The theme? Music. Arthur's love story, The Song is You , is elegant and full of feeling and keen observations about image versus content. Ben Greenman's Please Step Back is an electrifying fictional riff on the life and music of Sly Stone, fun and incisive, and spiked with playful language.
And here's my latest Chicago Public Radio interview. I'm speaking wtih artist and novelist Brian D'Amato about his highly imaginative, time-traveling Maya novel, In the Courts of the Sun.
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=34622
And here's my latest Chicago Public Radio interview. I'm speaking wtih artist and novelist Brian D'Amato about his highly imaginative, time-traveling Maya novel, In the Courts of the Sun.
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=34622
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Radio Review
Steve Amick's novel, Nothing But a Smile, is unusual in subject, tone, and perspective. I had great fun reviewing it concisely for Booklist, and then at length for Chicago Public Radio, where music enhances the ambiance. Take a listen:
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=34322
And if you would like to read along:
Nothing But a Smile, a novel by Steve Amick (Pantheon Books). Review for Eight-Forty-Eight by Donna Seaman. Air date: May 20, 2009.
During hard times when jobs are scarce, the more creative and intrepid among us draw on their entrepreneurial instinct and willingness to gamble, and put to use what they’ve been given, be it brains or beauty. Or both if you’re Sal Chesterton, the guiding light in Steve Amick’s naughty-but-nice novel Nothing But a Smile. Nothing But a Smile is a tale of good-old American ingenuity and self-reliance, and a spicy and sly novel about sex, hypocrisy, extortion, censorship, and sleaze. Nothing But a Smile is nothing if not fun and tantalizing.
It’s 1944 and Wink Dutton, an artist who got lucky and landed a spot as an illustrator for Stars and Stripes while serving in the Pacific, badly mangles his drawing hand in an absurd and demoralizing accident. He doesn’t know what sort of work he can do now that he can’t hold a pencil or pen, but at least he can fulfill his promise to his photographer buddy, Bill Chesterton, and look up his wife Sal when he gets to Chicago. She’s been managing their family camera shop all by herself. A shop in the Loop that Chicagoans may well picture as Central Photo on Wabash Avenue between Adams and Jackson––the city’s oldest camera shop, and a Chicago landmark with its classic old sign facing the shadow-casting el tracks.
Sal is happy to meet Wink, maybe a little too happy, but she doesn’t let on that she is struggling to keep the shop in business. Folks are broke and not inclined to spend their few precious dollars on cameras or film, and her bills are piling up. Plucky and resourceful, she’s been moonlighting at the Chicago Tribune as a darkroom technician. Hoping to earn more money and make better use of her skills, she asks an editor about working as a photographer. He tells her, “We’re not quite there, yet,” and suggests a secretarial job instead. Infuriated by such blatant sexism, Sal decides to capitalize on her know-how and good looks and sets to work shooting her first roll of girlie pictures, using herself as the model. She also decides to rent Wink the empty apartment above the shop, across from her own. Why not? She can use some help, and, given the spate of break-ins in the neighborhood, some protection. Wink doesn’t have to know about her little sideline.
But of course he finds out. And while Wink’s hand is damaged, his artist’s eye couldn’t be keener, and soon he’s behind the camera while Sal and her friend Reenie, a living, breathing pinup with a cheerfully risqué imagination, vamp it up, “exposing parts of themselves in ridiculous predicaments,” as Sal puts it. After some experimentation, the three hit the jackpot with their cleverly staged, cute-pie sexy photos, described in, let us say, lingering, if not loving detail. Clearly, Steve Amick conducted exhaustive research into classic 1940s pinups, suffering mightily in pursuit of historic accuracy. And if their peek-a-boo slapstick seems familiar, it’s because Amick is paying homage to a real-life Chicago-based illustrator renowned for his antic portraits of leggy, disarrayed beauties, Glen Elvgren, called the “Norman Rockwell of cheesecake.” Elvgren appears in Nothing But a Smile (does the title make more sense now?) as does a “hatchet-faced young guy named Hef,” a nod to another bit of Chicago skin-trade history as the home of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy.
If it sounds like Amick makes girlie pictures seem wholesome and harmless, rest assured the novel does not fail to address the darker side of the industry. Sal, Reenie, and Wink are threatened by mobsters, insulted by outraged neighbors and family, and arrested during a shoot on a North Side beach. The trio also contends with a shocking tragedy, a military cover-up, and trouble with the feds at the onset of the McCarthy-era Red Scare. When the Tribune publishes one of Wink’s serious photographs, a powerful portrait of a wounded G.I. reading the want ads, he’s tagged as a communist.
Steve Amick’s novel, Nothing But A Smile, is an unusual mix of literary and pulp fiction, a bawdy romp and a true romance. A wily work satire that asks, What is actually obscene? Nudity or war? Sex or sexism? Titillation or poverty? Amick’s artful and affecting novel of pinups and put-downs is a zesty inquiry into fairness and decency, free speech and justice, and the value of work and creativity. Nothing But a Smile is fresh, witty, immensely entertaining, and provocative in every sense of the word.
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=34322
And if you would like to read along:
Nothing But a Smile, a novel by Steve Amick (Pantheon Books). Review for Eight-Forty-Eight by Donna Seaman. Air date: May 20, 2009.
During hard times when jobs are scarce, the more creative and intrepid among us draw on their entrepreneurial instinct and willingness to gamble, and put to use what they’ve been given, be it brains or beauty. Or both if you’re Sal Chesterton, the guiding light in Steve Amick’s naughty-but-nice novel Nothing But a Smile. Nothing But a Smile is a tale of good-old American ingenuity and self-reliance, and a spicy and sly novel about sex, hypocrisy, extortion, censorship, and sleaze. Nothing But a Smile is nothing if not fun and tantalizing.
It’s 1944 and Wink Dutton, an artist who got lucky and landed a spot as an illustrator for Stars and Stripes while serving in the Pacific, badly mangles his drawing hand in an absurd and demoralizing accident. He doesn’t know what sort of work he can do now that he can’t hold a pencil or pen, but at least he can fulfill his promise to his photographer buddy, Bill Chesterton, and look up his wife Sal when he gets to Chicago. She’s been managing their family camera shop all by herself. A shop in the Loop that Chicagoans may well picture as Central Photo on Wabash Avenue between Adams and Jackson––the city’s oldest camera shop, and a Chicago landmark with its classic old sign facing the shadow-casting el tracks.
Sal is happy to meet Wink, maybe a little too happy, but she doesn’t let on that she is struggling to keep the shop in business. Folks are broke and not inclined to spend their few precious dollars on cameras or film, and her bills are piling up. Plucky and resourceful, she’s been moonlighting at the Chicago Tribune as a darkroom technician. Hoping to earn more money and make better use of her skills, she asks an editor about working as a photographer. He tells her, “We’re not quite there, yet,” and suggests a secretarial job instead. Infuriated by such blatant sexism, Sal decides to capitalize on her know-how and good looks and sets to work shooting her first roll of girlie pictures, using herself as the model. She also decides to rent Wink the empty apartment above the shop, across from her own. Why not? She can use some help, and, given the spate of break-ins in the neighborhood, some protection. Wink doesn’t have to know about her little sideline.
But of course he finds out. And while Wink’s hand is damaged, his artist’s eye couldn’t be keener, and soon he’s behind the camera while Sal and her friend Reenie, a living, breathing pinup with a cheerfully risqué imagination, vamp it up, “exposing parts of themselves in ridiculous predicaments,” as Sal puts it. After some experimentation, the three hit the jackpot with their cleverly staged, cute-pie sexy photos, described in, let us say, lingering, if not loving detail. Clearly, Steve Amick conducted exhaustive research into classic 1940s pinups, suffering mightily in pursuit of historic accuracy. And if their peek-a-boo slapstick seems familiar, it’s because Amick is paying homage to a real-life Chicago-based illustrator renowned for his antic portraits of leggy, disarrayed beauties, Glen Elvgren, called the “Norman Rockwell of cheesecake.” Elvgren appears in Nothing But a Smile (does the title make more sense now?) as does a “hatchet-faced young guy named Hef,” a nod to another bit of Chicago skin-trade history as the home of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy.
If it sounds like Amick makes girlie pictures seem wholesome and harmless, rest assured the novel does not fail to address the darker side of the industry. Sal, Reenie, and Wink are threatened by mobsters, insulted by outraged neighbors and family, and arrested during a shoot on a North Side beach. The trio also contends with a shocking tragedy, a military cover-up, and trouble with the feds at the onset of the McCarthy-era Red Scare. When the Tribune publishes one of Wink’s serious photographs, a powerful portrait of a wounded G.I. reading the want ads, he’s tagged as a communist.
Steve Amick’s novel, Nothing But A Smile, is an unusual mix of literary and pulp fiction, a bawdy romp and a true romance. A wily work satire that asks, What is actually obscene? Nudity or war? Sex or sexism? Titillation or poverty? Amick’s artful and affecting novel of pinups and put-downs is a zesty inquiry into fairness and decency, free speech and justice, and the value of work and creativity. Nothing But a Smile is fresh, witty, immensely entertaining, and provocative in every sense of the word.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
A review
My latest review for the Chicago Tribune:
Housewife finds her wings watching the world's birds
By Donna Seaman | Special to the Tribune
May 23, 2009
"Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds"
By Olivia Gentile
Bloomsbury, 345 pages, $26
Her mother said it best, "Phoebe is a bird, afraid of being caged." Crowned "the world's leading bird-watcher" by the Guinness Book of World Records in 1994, Phoebe Snetsinger described her devotion to birding as "emotional salvation." In her quest to see more bird species than anyone had ever imagined possible, she traveled the seven continents many times over, surpassed many ornithologists in expertise, published zesty birding articles and became a legend. She also skipped her mother's funeral, missed her eldest daughter's wedding and left her husband alone for months at a time.
The daughter of Naomi and Leo Burnett, founder of the renowned, Chicago-based advertising agency, Leo Burnett Co., tomboy Phoebe dreamed of becoming a scientist while growing up in Glencoe and Lake Zurich. But she graduated from college during the 1950s, and, as journalist and first-time biographer Olivia Gentile so astutely observes, not even a brainy and ambitious gal like Snetsinger was immune to society's husband-and-children-first directive for women. Accordingly, Snetsinger married, assumed the role of a suburban, stay-at-home mother of four and became so depressed "she felt like she was inside a tomb." Until the day a friend handed Snetsinger a pair of binoculars and pointed out a Blackburnian warbler.
An eagle-eyed stoic with a steely memory, Snetsinger was a natural in the field, and her "life list" of the bird species she saw and identified grew at a dizzying pace. As the first woman to tally 5,000 birds, she was exultant. Informed just before her 50th birthday that she had advanced melanoma and less than a year to live, she was devastated. Did she hang up her binoculars and cease circling the globe like a migrating bird? Certainly not. Time was short, so she planned even more arduous expeditions. Gentile wonders if perhaps Snetsinger hoped that perpetual motion and a fierce concentration on birds would enable her to outrun and outsmart the disease.
What astounding birds Snetsinger saw, the most exotic vividly described by Gentile, a bird convert under the influence of her compelling subject. Here are striking word sketches of the gray crowned-crane, lilac-breasted roller, harpy eagle, red bird-of-paradise, shoebill, Ceylon frogmouth and rufus-necked wood-rail. Snetsinger was blessed with enough time and money to be able to follow guides into swamps, jungles and deserts, up mountains and across rivers and oceans, often under the most grueling conditions. Over time, her journeys grew increasingly urgent. Not only because she was racing against death, but also because the planet's birds, "mostly as a result of habitat destruction and other human blunders," are facing extinction. Snetsinger experienced ecstasy in the presence of magnificent birds, but also faced despair, peril and terror.
Gentile chronicles Snetsinger's miraculous survival of treacherous trails, a lethal strain of malaria, a brush with tribal warfare, a potentially fatal boat accident, a sprained ankle and a broken wrist. She was taken hostage in Ethiopia, and, most horrifically, gang-raped in Papua New Guinea. But nothing stopped her. Each trauma toughened her resolve and intensified her sense of mission. Snetsinger's life list was her lifeline, and no one saw as many species as she did. She reached 8,398. Death claimed her in Madagascar at 68 in 1999. And no, it wasn't cancer (a vehicle accident on a birding tour).
Gentile tells Snetsinger's staggering story with clarity and verve. She reflects incisively on the shadow side of Snetsinger's quest¿¿the perverse metamorphosis that turned a liberating passion into a devouring addiction, and perceptively elucidates and celebrates her accomplishments. A remarkable woman of tenacity, courage and transcendence, Snetsinger leaves a profound legacy, which will now be more fully appreciated and treasured thanks to Gentile's enthralling, provocative and inspiring biography.
Donna Seaman is an associate editor for Booklist and a book critic for Chicago Public Radio. Her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air.
"Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds"
By Olivia Gentile
Bloomsbury, 345 pages, $26
Housewife finds her wings watching the world's birds
By Donna Seaman | Special to the Tribune
May 23, 2009
"Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds"
By Olivia Gentile
Bloomsbury, 345 pages, $26
Her mother said it best, "Phoebe is a bird, afraid of being caged." Crowned "the world's leading bird-watcher" by the Guinness Book of World Records in 1994, Phoebe Snetsinger described her devotion to birding as "emotional salvation." In her quest to see more bird species than anyone had ever imagined possible, she traveled the seven continents many times over, surpassed many ornithologists in expertise, published zesty birding articles and became a legend. She also skipped her mother's funeral, missed her eldest daughter's wedding and left her husband alone for months at a time.
The daughter of Naomi and Leo Burnett, founder of the renowned, Chicago-based advertising agency, Leo Burnett Co., tomboy Phoebe dreamed of becoming a scientist while growing up in Glencoe and Lake Zurich. But she graduated from college during the 1950s, and, as journalist and first-time biographer Olivia Gentile so astutely observes, not even a brainy and ambitious gal like Snetsinger was immune to society's husband-and-children-first directive for women. Accordingly, Snetsinger married, assumed the role of a suburban, stay-at-home mother of four and became so depressed "she felt like she was inside a tomb." Until the day a friend handed Snetsinger a pair of binoculars and pointed out a Blackburnian warbler.
An eagle-eyed stoic with a steely memory, Snetsinger was a natural in the field, and her "life list" of the bird species she saw and identified grew at a dizzying pace. As the first woman to tally 5,000 birds, she was exultant. Informed just before her 50th birthday that she had advanced melanoma and less than a year to live, she was devastated. Did she hang up her binoculars and cease circling the globe like a migrating bird? Certainly not. Time was short, so she planned even more arduous expeditions. Gentile wonders if perhaps Snetsinger hoped that perpetual motion and a fierce concentration on birds would enable her to outrun and outsmart the disease.
What astounding birds Snetsinger saw, the most exotic vividly described by Gentile, a bird convert under the influence of her compelling subject. Here are striking word sketches of the gray crowned-crane, lilac-breasted roller, harpy eagle, red bird-of-paradise, shoebill, Ceylon frogmouth and rufus-necked wood-rail. Snetsinger was blessed with enough time and money to be able to follow guides into swamps, jungles and deserts, up mountains and across rivers and oceans, often under the most grueling conditions. Over time, her journeys grew increasingly urgent. Not only because she was racing against death, but also because the planet's birds, "mostly as a result of habitat destruction and other human blunders," are facing extinction. Snetsinger experienced ecstasy in the presence of magnificent birds, but also faced despair, peril and terror.
Gentile chronicles Snetsinger's miraculous survival of treacherous trails, a lethal strain of malaria, a brush with tribal warfare, a potentially fatal boat accident, a sprained ankle and a broken wrist. She was taken hostage in Ethiopia, and, most horrifically, gang-raped in Papua New Guinea. But nothing stopped her. Each trauma toughened her resolve and intensified her sense of mission. Snetsinger's life list was her lifeline, and no one saw as many species as she did. She reached 8,398. Death claimed her in Madagascar at 68 in 1999. And no, it wasn't cancer (a vehicle accident on a birding tour).
Gentile tells Snetsinger's staggering story with clarity and verve. She reflects incisively on the shadow side of Snetsinger's quest¿¿the perverse metamorphosis that turned a liberating passion into a devouring addiction, and perceptively elucidates and celebrates her accomplishments. A remarkable woman of tenacity, courage and transcendence, Snetsinger leaves a profound legacy, which will now be more fully appreciated and treasured thanks to Gentile's enthralling, provocative and inspiring biography.
Donna Seaman is an associate editor for Booklist and a book critic for Chicago Public Radio. Her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air.
"Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds"
By Olivia Gentile
Bloomsbury, 345 pages, $26
Monday, May 11, 2009
Hot off the press
I'm thrilled to announce that the issue of TriQuarterly I had the great good amazing fortune to guest edit is now available.
#133 is a big, juicy issue full of poems, fiction, essays, and photographs by writers of phenomenal powers. Not to mention the beautiful and provoking drawing, "Snapdragon," on the cover by Chicago artist Jayne Hileman. The theme of the issue is "Strong Medicine," and here's a bit of my introduction:
My respect for the mystery implicit in creativity runs high, so I decided not to interfere with the process in my role as guest editor for this brimming issue of TriQuarterly. I did not name a theme, or assign a topic. Instead, I sought out writers who see life whole, who are curious about the interconnectivity and complexity of existence, and who care, deeply and unabashedly, about the world. When asked what I was looking for, I simply said, “strong medicine.”
Medicine, the dictionary tells us, is not only “a substance or preparation used in treating disease.” It is also “something that affects well-being,” and “magical power or a magical rite.” Reading and looking at art are not only intellectual and emotional pursuits. We read with our entire body; we take in a painting or sculpture with every cell. We feel the impact of stories, images, and music in our very bones. There are, after all, no divides between body, mind, and spirit, and many of us rely on literature and art to keep us alive and well, just as we need food, air, and water, sleep and touch. Good writing is a tonic. The work of inquisitive, imaginative, unfettered, and courageous observers, thinkers, and dreamers provides succor. Heat and light. Food for thought and balm for pain. Lucid and compassionate literature breaks the isolating fever of the self.
Clarion writing is strong medicine for what ails us, and the list of our disorders, our follies and crimes, is long and harrowing. The suffering we cause and endure is beyond diagnosis; our destruction of the living world is suicidal, malignant, terminal, evil. Yet we do try to make sense of our perversity, our brutality. We do learn; we do change. And it is the stories we tell that alert us to our maladies and suggest modes of healing. Without stories, chronicles, and poems, we would have no clue to what goes on in the minds of others, no insight into how other people live and define life. Right and wrong are embedded in stories; the great, glimmering web of life is best traced with words; the symbiotic relationships that make possible this planet’s mantle of green and intersecting family trees of creatures great and small, marine and legged, are best revealed by those who have a gift for precision and metaphor, for finding words for the beauty and wonder they discern everywhere they look and listen.
I treat my own afflictions of the spirit with art and writing that is revelatory, insurgent, and transforming. I imbibe images and language electric with that green force that through art’s alchemy reorients and recalibrates our perceptions, affirms our belonging. That essential radiance is present in each of the poems, essays, stories, and photographs that follow. Here is serenity and anger. Tragedy shocking and ordinary. Satire and suspense, lyricism and irony, desire and elegy. The brazen and the enigmatic. The absurd and the dire. Writers cross borders between the past and the present, the wild and the cultivated, the personal and the universal, the actual and the imagined, the rational and the incomprehensible, the horrific and the sublime. The creators take risks, and we the readers take chances as we accept each infusion, elixir, shock, or shot.
For a table of contents, look here: http://www.triquarterly.org/toc.cfm
Thank you to everyone who contributed to TriQuarterly#133. And thank you to the wonderful TriQuarterly staff, Susan Hahn and Ian Morris.
Let me know what you think.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Remembering a Chicago Writer
In thinking about a forthcoming tribute to Studs Terkel here in Chicago at a great club called Metro, I returned to this piece about Nelson Algren. A shorter version appeared in BOOKLIST last month on the 100th anniversary of Algren's birth.
Another Look At: Nelson Algren
Nelson Algren, champion of the underdogs of the underworld, is a great underrated American writer. In spite of receiving the first National Book Award for fiction––presented to him by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1950 for The Man with The Golden Arm, a novel of poverty, drugs, and desperation––he was maligned as vulgar and sensational, dismissed by Leslie Fielder as “the bard of the stumblebum.” Briskly forgotten after his death in 1981, his unnerving books promptly went out-of-print. Yet readers the world over recognized the power of his gritty, unflinching tales, books akin to those of Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and John Steinbeck. Thanks to the efforts of writers and critics, his books have been republished. And now, at the centennial of his birth, Nelson Algren is resurgent when we need him the most.
Of Swedish, German, and Jewish descent, he was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit on March 28, 1909, and grew up in Chicago, where his father worked as a machinist. Algren graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism during the Great Depression, and hit the road in search of work in Louisiana and Texas. Inspired by Baudelaire, Tolstoy, and Dostovesky, Algren began writing short stories, later collected in The Neon Wilderness (1946) and The Last Carousel (1973). His first novel, Somebody in Boots, came out in 1935. Algren remained immersed in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods. The streets, bars, backrooms, and courts were his theater, the jails and police stations his libraries. And then his second novel, Never Come Morning (1942), hit like a bomb.
Set on the meanest streets of Chicago’s Polish American community, Never Come Morning is the brutally intense story of Bruno “Lefty” Bicek, a poor, bewildered bruiser trapped in a net of lies, violence, crime, and gangs. Grim and disturbing, the novel is nonetheless alight with radioactive lyricism and caustic humor. It also evinces a startling intimacy with thugs, con artists, and the cramped, filthy bars and jail cells they frequent. A self-described “up close” writer, Algren wrote from direct experience. He was a compulsive gambler, a regular at various dives, and had done time. For stealing a typewriter.
Never Come Morning infuriated that powers-that-be in Chicago, resulting in a call to ban the novel from public libraries. Algren eventually addressed Chis hometown’s rabid disapproval in Chicago: City on the Make (1951), a heady and lacerating prose-poem condemning his two-faced, hustlers’ town. But first, radical and irreverent Algren bucked the button-up mode of the McCarthy era and fed his fat FBI dossier as he persisted in revealing the truth about humankind’s inhumanity in his next unforgettable Chicago novel, The Man with the Golden Arm.
Everything goes wrong for Frankie Machine, a poker dealer, a junkie, and a slum Job. He lives wretchedly with wheelchair-bound Sophie, her plight his fault. Theirs is a “world of petty cheats, phony braggarts, double clockers, elbow sneaks, small-time chiselers, touts and stooges and glad-hand-shakers,” and all the down-and-outers suffer from the “great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. . .Their very lives gave off a certain jailhouse odor: it trailed down the streets of Skid Row behind them till the city itself seemed some sort of open-roofed jail.”
In the posthumously published Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, Algren states, “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” Self-deprecating and ironic, an avid listener and a stalwart witness, Algren was of the underworld, yet separate from it. His balancing act is evocatively captured in Art Shay’s Chicago’s Nelson Algren (2007), a book of striking photographs and candid reminiscences. A buddy of Algren’s, Shay carried a concealed camera on their peregrinations and caught the writer, his brow speared by a widow’s peak, his eyes protected by glasses and bright with sadness, intently watching moments of mayhem, respectful and rueful. Algren stored it all up and wrote it all down in a feverish torrent of compassion and outrage, bemusement and sorrow.
A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), the novel he was most proud of, is set in Texas and New Orleans, in boxcars and brothels. A brilliantly crafted anti-bildungsroman, it stars Dove Linkhorn, first seen in Somebody in Boots. Here Dove is a rambling, illiterate country boy looking to earn a living among pimps and prostitutes. Expansive, poetic, ribald, and roguishly funny, Algren’s darkly picaresque tale grapples with issues of race, sex, and class.
A night owl, Algren loved cats, and kept in shape by pounding on a boxing bag. Ripped off when he sold the film rights, he despised the movie version of The Man with the Golden Arm, which won Frank Sinatra an Oscar. The women in his edgy fiction are as tough as the men, and usually smarter. Algren was married three times, twice to the same gal. He was deeply in love with trailblazing French philosopher, writer, and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who broke his heart.
Increasingly embittered and destructive, Algren wrote poisonous satire about New York’s literary establishment and devilishly outlandish and critical travel pieces. He left Chicago for New Jersey to work on his last novel, The Devil’s Stocking (1983), based on the murder trial of the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and made new enemies. He found sanctuary in Sag Harbor, and after he was finally elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, he planned a cocktail party to celebrate on May 9, 1981. Kurt Vonnegut hoped to bring Salmon Rushdie along, since Algren had reviewed Midnight’s Children. But when Vonnegut called Algren’s house, a police officer answered. Algren was dead, done in by a massive heart attack in a house full of unopened bottles of booze.
Algren was angry at being misunderstood and angry at being unable to help the people he wrote about. He was burdened with his knowledge of lost innocence and endless guilt, unredeemed trust and secret fear, strangled hopes and cancelled joy, beauty twisted and tattered, life bought and sold. We mark the 100th anniversary of Algren’s birth while experiencing the worst loss of jobs and homes since the Great Depression, during an economic collapse driven by the very greed, lies, and corruption he condemned, a crisis delivering the same soul-killing suffering he railed against. Nelson Algren’s electrifying prose, steely-eyed vision, marksman humor, and tough compassion speak today with renewed vigor and resonance.
Another Look At: Nelson Algren
Nelson Algren, champion of the underdogs of the underworld, is a great underrated American writer. In spite of receiving the first National Book Award for fiction––presented to him by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1950 for The Man with The Golden Arm, a novel of poverty, drugs, and desperation––he was maligned as vulgar and sensational, dismissed by Leslie Fielder as “the bard of the stumblebum.” Briskly forgotten after his death in 1981, his unnerving books promptly went out-of-print. Yet readers the world over recognized the power of his gritty, unflinching tales, books akin to those of Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and John Steinbeck. Thanks to the efforts of writers and critics, his books have been republished. And now, at the centennial of his birth, Nelson Algren is resurgent when we need him the most.
Of Swedish, German, and Jewish descent, he was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit on March 28, 1909, and grew up in Chicago, where his father worked as a machinist. Algren graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism during the Great Depression, and hit the road in search of work in Louisiana and Texas. Inspired by Baudelaire, Tolstoy, and Dostovesky, Algren began writing short stories, later collected in The Neon Wilderness (1946) and The Last Carousel (1973). His first novel, Somebody in Boots, came out in 1935. Algren remained immersed in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods. The streets, bars, backrooms, and courts were his theater, the jails and police stations his libraries. And then his second novel, Never Come Morning (1942), hit like a bomb.
Set on the meanest streets of Chicago’s Polish American community, Never Come Morning is the brutally intense story of Bruno “Lefty” Bicek, a poor, bewildered bruiser trapped in a net of lies, violence, crime, and gangs. Grim and disturbing, the novel is nonetheless alight with radioactive lyricism and caustic humor. It also evinces a startling intimacy with thugs, con artists, and the cramped, filthy bars and jail cells they frequent. A self-described “up close” writer, Algren wrote from direct experience. He was a compulsive gambler, a regular at various dives, and had done time. For stealing a typewriter.
Never Come Morning infuriated that powers-that-be in Chicago, resulting in a call to ban the novel from public libraries. Algren eventually addressed Chis hometown’s rabid disapproval in Chicago: City on the Make (1951), a heady and lacerating prose-poem condemning his two-faced, hustlers’ town. But first, radical and irreverent Algren bucked the button-up mode of the McCarthy era and fed his fat FBI dossier as he persisted in revealing the truth about humankind’s inhumanity in his next unforgettable Chicago novel, The Man with the Golden Arm.
Everything goes wrong for Frankie Machine, a poker dealer, a junkie, and a slum Job. He lives wretchedly with wheelchair-bound Sophie, her plight his fault. Theirs is a “world of petty cheats, phony braggarts, double clockers, elbow sneaks, small-time chiselers, touts and stooges and glad-hand-shakers,” and all the down-and-outers suffer from the “great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. . .Their very lives gave off a certain jailhouse odor: it trailed down the streets of Skid Row behind them till the city itself seemed some sort of open-roofed jail.”
In the posthumously published Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, Algren states, “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” Self-deprecating and ironic, an avid listener and a stalwart witness, Algren was of the underworld, yet separate from it. His balancing act is evocatively captured in Art Shay’s Chicago’s Nelson Algren (2007), a book of striking photographs and candid reminiscences. A buddy of Algren’s, Shay carried a concealed camera on their peregrinations and caught the writer, his brow speared by a widow’s peak, his eyes protected by glasses and bright with sadness, intently watching moments of mayhem, respectful and rueful. Algren stored it all up and wrote it all down in a feverish torrent of compassion and outrage, bemusement and sorrow.
A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), the novel he was most proud of, is set in Texas and New Orleans, in boxcars and brothels. A brilliantly crafted anti-bildungsroman, it stars Dove Linkhorn, first seen in Somebody in Boots. Here Dove is a rambling, illiterate country boy looking to earn a living among pimps and prostitutes. Expansive, poetic, ribald, and roguishly funny, Algren’s darkly picaresque tale grapples with issues of race, sex, and class.
A night owl, Algren loved cats, and kept in shape by pounding on a boxing bag. Ripped off when he sold the film rights, he despised the movie version of The Man with the Golden Arm, which won Frank Sinatra an Oscar. The women in his edgy fiction are as tough as the men, and usually smarter. Algren was married three times, twice to the same gal. He was deeply in love with trailblazing French philosopher, writer, and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who broke his heart.
Increasingly embittered and destructive, Algren wrote poisonous satire about New York’s literary establishment and devilishly outlandish and critical travel pieces. He left Chicago for New Jersey to work on his last novel, The Devil’s Stocking (1983), based on the murder trial of the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and made new enemies. He found sanctuary in Sag Harbor, and after he was finally elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, he planned a cocktail party to celebrate on May 9, 1981. Kurt Vonnegut hoped to bring Salmon Rushdie along, since Algren had reviewed Midnight’s Children. But when Vonnegut called Algren’s house, a police officer answered. Algren was dead, done in by a massive heart attack in a house full of unopened bottles of booze.
Algren was angry at being misunderstood and angry at being unable to help the people he wrote about. He was burdened with his knowledge of lost innocence and endless guilt, unredeemed trust and secret fear, strangled hopes and cancelled joy, beauty twisted and tattered, life bought and sold. We mark the 100th anniversary of Algren’s birth while experiencing the worst loss of jobs and homes since the Great Depression, during an economic collapse driven by the very greed, lies, and corruption he condemned, a crisis delivering the same soul-killing suffering he railed against. Nelson Algren’s electrifying prose, steely-eyed vision, marksman humor, and tough compassion speak today with renewed vigor and resonance.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Upcoming appearance
In Chicago. I'm honored to be speaking about a unique and wonderful book, Home Ground. See below for details.
Donna Seaman
Date: Wed. April 22, 2009
Time: 6:00 pm
Location:
Harold Washington Library Center
Authors Room
400 S. State Street
60605
About this event:
Celebrate Earth Day with Donna Seaman, Booklist associate editor, Open Books host and WBEZ 848 book contributor, as she discusses, reads from and signs the book, Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. This book brings together 45 poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters. The writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jon Krakauer, Charles Frazier and Antonya Nelson, draw from careful research as well as on their own distinctive personal and regional diversity to portray in vivid prose the striking complexity of the landscapes we inhabit, from Missouri’s woody draws to Virginia’s runs, from California’s bajadas to Alaska’s pingos and Hawaii’s shield volcanoes. At the heart of Home Ground is a community of writers reviving a language that exemplifies the variety and vastness of the American landscape.
Donna Seaman
Date: Wed. April 22, 2009
Time: 6:00 pm
Location:
Harold Washington Library Center
Authors Room
400 S. State Street
60605
About this event:
Celebrate Earth Day with Donna Seaman, Booklist associate editor, Open Books host and WBEZ 848 book contributor, as she discusses, reads from and signs the book, Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. This book brings together 45 poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters. The writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jon Krakauer, Charles Frazier and Antonya Nelson, draw from careful research as well as on their own distinctive personal and regional diversity to portray in vivid prose the striking complexity of the landscapes we inhabit, from Missouri’s woody draws to Virginia’s runs, from California’s bajadas to Alaska’s pingos and Hawaii’s shield volcanoes. At the heart of Home Ground is a community of writers reviving a language that exemplifies the variety and vastness of the American landscape.
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