BOOKS
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nature occur; hut to the protagonists nothing happens which does not take
on the flat taste of everyday living. Their speech and their actions are
full of an easy brutality and a casual viciousness that spring naturally
from a social group whose moral tone is completely diseased. Algren
proposes no remedies; he just barely sketches the disadvantages of such
a background, and indicates, in passing, the futility and helplessness of
such relief agencies as society makes available.
Bruno Bicek, the ball-playing, pugilist hero, may be said to be a more
sympathetic character than his companions only because he is young, con–
fused and weak. He dreams of triumphs in the ring and on the diamond,
he adheres to his group's standards, and he fears its members. Hence he
hands over his girl to half the hoodlums in the neighborhood, for a mon–
strous line-up rape, during which, bewildered and sickened by his half–
understood betrayal, he commits murder. The girl is eased into a brothel;
the boy gets a moral blow from which he does not recover; everything
else goes on as before, except that the two persons with a taint of bour–
geois imagination have been rendered helpless, one by justice, the other
by violence.
Apart from making his heroine a Christian and resigned. character,
Algren spares us any leavening glimpses into a life more wholesome and
gentle. This is not to say that he is not maudlin. He is. His brothel scenes
are painfully sentimental, and Mama Tomek, the head of this dubious
household, is a character distilled from pure corn. The reader thinks of
Reba in Faulkner's
Sanctuarj,
and of her richly humorous house. How
the whole rendition sparkles in comparison with this! Thi:;; account may
be as authentic but it is neither as convincing nor as interesting, and
because of the damage it does, in its present form, to the structure of the
novel as a whole, it should have been left out, or rewritten with some of
the
cunning and economy which Algren manages for the greater part of
this book. His pageant of prostitutes, in which each girl conveniently
retells the story of her fall, and his pageants of jailbirds, which gives us
a neat cross section of the criminal types of a large city, share the same
fault of interrupting the drive of the narra#ve. They are excresences.
Algren seems to regard them as cadenzas, but curiously enough, it is in
these sections that his true virtuosity fails him.
The episode in which the hero is questioned in jail was a good story
when it appeared in
Tke Soutkern Review.
It is even better here, in the
frame of the novel. There is good, clear, unencumbered writing all
through. Algren is, in general, a very sharp observer. The atmosphere
penetrates one's consciousness and recurs with surprising force because
of the powerful and sensitive description. Altogether, language is handled
with a feeling for style; the speech rhythms are effective, and the Polish
turns of phrase ring true. The slang is sometimes obtrusive, as in the
moving
pictures~
"Or
maybe the barber would get him a fight with some
head-shy boogie ... and he'd ice the jig with a punch." Sometimes his
hand with symbols is a little heavy, and when Bicek, on his way to seduce
