Reviews

The bruised romantic's Bible: a sagacious tale of melancholy lostness underpinned by a fundamental, indubitable sense of something transcendentally positive underlying that hell.

Algren himself described it almost perfectly when he said: "the book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

GR reviewer Christopher Flynn had a good shot at it, too: "Sort of like On the Road if Kerouac had written instead of typed."

Fun fact: Lou Reed was approached, in 1970, in relation to a project that was to turn this book into a musical. Nothing came of it, though the results would have surely been staggering for one reason or another. Reed would go on to name his hit "Walk on the Wild Side" after the book, a book the song shares much in common with. The book (and Algren) seem to have a longer half-life in down-and-out, wounded, sentimental rock music than in literature departments and the general literary fiction circle, which would seem odd but for the book's enduring underdog sensibility, a perfect match for the likes of The Hold Steady's Craig Finn, among others, whose lyrical, complex tales of "lost people" bring Algren sharply to mind.

haholmes's review against another edition

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5.0

Filled with characters who you love to hate and hate to love, A Walk on the Wild Side is a beautifully written book on the struggle of a boy enduring the 1930s.

jonathantoews19's review against another edition

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5.0

Counting this as one of the books I read in 2017 because I re-read it to research for an in-progress essay, and that's good enough for me. "A Walk on the Wild Side" isn't my favorite Algren book (it will forever lag behind his two Chicago novels, "The Man with the Golden Arm" and "Never Come Morning," in that order), but it might be the most well put-together. It's far more accessible than his Chicago novels, and while it's certainly depressing in its own way, the books is more absurdly hilarious than depressing and sad. And while some would label that as an advantage over his horrifically melancholy novels, I'd argue that to do so would be to miss the key nuance of Algren's work. Sure, the absurdity better encapsulates what Algren meant to convey with his epigraph in "The Man with the Golden Arm:" "Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this-- that there is no horror!"

realbooks4ever's review

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4.0

A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, by one of the most outstanding novelists of the 20th century, Nelson Algren, is another amazing example of his inimitable style. Here he follows illiterate Dove, a teenager from an outback town, to depression-era Louisiana (last century’s depression, not the current one). He ends up on Perdido Street, a part of New Orleans where prostitutes, the disabled, drunks, and cons mingled.
This is a critique on the unfairness of the wealth distribution in this country which continues to this day. A time of “Self-reliance for the penniless and government aid for those who already had more than they could use..."
Algren’s style in this book is fabulous, sometimes sing-song rhyme, sometimes slow and wistful, with a southern drawl. “To this lopsided shambles owned by this unlicensed ghost, this speakeasy spook who had been alive once but died in the crash and was now only haunting the thirties, came trudging, some uphill and some down, all those who could not admit that the money was spent, the dream was over; the magic done. They still wore the clothes they wore before 1929 and no one knew when they might buy clothes again.”
Sometimes Dove isn’t even aware how miserable his situation is. After all, it’s all he knows.
“…when he saw men encircling someone or something down the street he hurried there as fast as his butter-colored shoes could make steps…
…a little round man with something glistening in his hand. Dove elbowed in to see what glistened so nicely.
A cawfee pot.
Hello, pot.
Shor a purty old pot.
“Wreneger’s the name,” the little round man was telling his crew, “but you can call me plain old ‘Smiley”…”
Little old red ’n green cawfee pot. Well I be dawg. Bet you make right good cawfee.
“The idea aint to see how many doors you can rap of a morning-THAT aint sellin’…”
I had me a cawfee pot like you, cawfee pot, I’d know where to get the chicory for you.
”Heed the housewife’s woes, boys. Give ear to her trials and little cares. Make her joys your joys, her tears your tears…sooner or later she’s going to ask ‘Young man, whatever is that contraption in your hand?’”
“Look like a cawfee pot to me,” Dove helped the man out.
“Thank you, Red. You work with me…”
A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE examines exceptionally well the existence of some of the truly poor during the early 1930’s and I recommend it highly.

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