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July 08, 2009

NBA 60

The National Book Foundation has launched a blog honoring 60 years of NBA winners.  We're on deck for a few titles by summer's end, but for now do check out NBA finalist Rachel Kushner on Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm.  (Had to triple check to make sure we didn't put "Gun" in place of "Arm".)

What is no longer really tolerated, or even practiced, is living to tell the way that he did. Was it ever tolerated? By living to tell, I mean portraying a realm unfamiliar to the literary world, which mostly depicts a social class whose troubles take hold despite money and elite schooling. I’m still amazed that this dark and risky novel, The Man with the Golden Arm—it ends with a poem/epitaph!—won such high canonical praise (perhaps making way for descendents like Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, and Denis Johnson’s Angels?). There are hazards to working in realms peopled by “denizens,” and certain aspects of Algren’s novel do seem quaint and even meretricious—like Frankie Machine’s articulated aim of going “from monkey to zero” in hopes of making it “pounding the tubs” (though Algren is never as meretricious as Otto Preminger’s awful movie version of the book). Many of his descriptions are perfectly keyed, the junkies and their “rigid, panicky walk,” the women with hair “set so stiffly it looked metallic.” In any case, Algren didn’t choose his subject. It chose him, and he went along.

Posted at 12:54 AM in Litlinks |

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Comments

Niall

I'm not sure why Kushner thinks writing about outsider communities is no longer tolerated. It continues to be a staple of genre fiction (or doesn't that count?). And Man Gone Down, which won this year's Impac prize, is all about the economic fringe communities, the writing of which is supposedly no longer tolerated. By whom?

Posted by: Niall | July 08, 2009 at 01:23 PM

rachel kushner

Hi,
I'm glad you brought this up. I didn't say writing about outsider communities is no longer tolerated. I said living in them in order to write about them isn't, or possibly never was. There are exceptions (which only prove the rule in my opinion), though I would not consider Man Gone Down among them, since Thomas was a teacher of fiction as he wrote the book (not a bookie or prisoner),and the outside here is primarily racial, another (and much larger, more pressing) issue entirely (being a black American is not opting to "live in order to tell"). Algren shaped his life a certain way in order to write about that shape.

For better or worse, most writers of literary fiction come from the upper middle class, and most writing teachers do not encourage people to "live" in order to accrue material, and instead quote Flannery O'Connor, "Anybody who has survived his childhood..."

Lastly, re: genre fiction, I was talking about NBA winners and high institutional praise, and so no, it doesn't really count in this specific context.

Posted by: rachel kushner | July 08, 2009 at 05:33 PM

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TEV DEFINED


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