Cheap The Man With the Golden Arm (Book) (Nelson Algren) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Man With the Golden Arm

Reading Nelson Algren
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> This is a wonderful book! Nelson Algren knocks spots off of his contemporaries;chiefly because he actually lived the lives of those he wrote about.<
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> The language is fabulously arkane and is only just seeping into everyday usage.We now know that a 'mark' is a person about to be 'hustled'(ie conned and robbed) and thanks to TV poker we know what the punk has when he looks at 3 J's wired! Unfortuneately,we also know all the drug terms as well.<
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> The plot is wafer thin and largely irrelevent-Frankie Machine kills Louie the pusher;his run ins with the law;his dead beat marriage and affair with Molly-O-;its the cast of division line Chicago slum dwellers that are everything.If you read this fishing for a plot to hook into,you'll soon get lost.But if you read each segmented paragraph as a short story in its own right that merges into a bigger picture;you can't fail to love this magnificent book.Dickens never had such a cast of characters to call on!

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Dated novel that doesn't ring true on any level
I can accept that this book was a classic in its day and obviously you had to be there then to appreciate its shock value at the time. However, great literature should transcend the time that it was written in and should reach out and speak to future generations. There are plenty of novels from that era that do just that but The Man With The Golden Arm is not one of them. It is ponderous, turgid and lacks any sense of urgency and desperation that its central theme - heroin addiction - should necessitate. Situations and relationships are one-dimensional and cardboard-cutout-like rendering them thoroughly implausible. However, the real failure of this novel is in it's dreadfully antiquated 'hip speech', a failed attempt on the part of Algren to capture the street lingo of the time. Trying to capture speech patterns in print is a delicate task that needs to be executed with skill and precision for it to work, neither qualities which seem apparent here. Instead, it sounds false and clumsy, making the novel unnecessarily difficult to read.<
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>Bottom Line: If you're looking for an accurate depiction of drug addiction in '50s America, you won't find it here.

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Worth reading
I heard the title The Man with the Golden Arm long before I ever read the book or saw the movie. It's a beautiful, evocative title, but it also makes you think of something grotesque: a man with a shiny prosthetic. When I got older, and knew the story centered on a junkie, the connotation became even more disturbing: an arm jaundiced by the hypo. I was never much into addiction stories and Algren's book (purchased as a shiny new softcover back in the early 80s, when I was spending the greater part of my college loan money on the creation of a private library) sat on my shelf for more than 20 years.<
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>It turns out that the book is quite a good read. Algren locates the source of dealer Frankie Machine's addiction in his WW2 service-he was wounded and got hooked on the morphine that eased the pain of his injury. The novel also makes clear, though, that in spite of his friends' admiration and awe of his Purple Heart, Frankie was no hero. A grunt's grunt, he remained three years a private.<
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>While the novel tells the story of Frankie's several attempts to kick the stuff, what we get out of it is the tale of a loser in a community of losers, people the American dream has left behind: small-time swindlers, dwellers in fleabag tenements, drunks, and sweet girls who can't get a break Among the sad detritus of this universe, located around Chicago's West Division Street, Frankie Machine shines like a star, with his big talk and his talent (the "golden arm" refers to his sure skill dealing cards, which he hopes to transfer to playing the drums in a big band).<
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>Still, his life spirals downward. And although the drugs are central, you can't help feeling that if it weren't morphine that did Frankie in, it would have been something else. At bottom, he doesn't believe he's worth saving; one of the achievements of the novel is that you end up feeling they're all worth saving, not just Frankie, but also his grimier fellows. Algren draws his characters with such vividness that he takes you beyond pity and amusement to pure empathy with their humanity.