A review by jonathantoews19
A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren

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!"