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A review by adamz24
A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren
5.0
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.
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.