The Man with the Golden Arm
by Nelson Algren
Summary
Frankie Machine deals the cards in an illegal game on Division Street, in the Polish Chicago of the late 1940s, and his nickname is his trade: the golden arm that never fumbles a deal. He came back from the war with shrapnel and a habit the book calls the thirty five pound monkey, morphine, and the novel is the record of the monkey slowly winning.
Around Frankie, Algren builds the whole ecosystem of a poor neighbourhood: Sophie, his wife, in a wheelchair since a drunken car crash that may or may not have injured her body as badly as she says, keeping Frankie chained to her with guilt; Molly, downstairs, who loves him and offers the one door out; Sparrow, the punk who steals dogs and worships him; the dealer Louie, who sells the fixes and collects the souls. When Frankie's need and Louie's contempt collide, a man ends up dead, and the last third of the novel is a manhunt closing in on a man already cornered by himself.
What made the book famous is not the plot but the prose and the sympathy: Algren writes the police lineups, the taverns, the lockups and the four in the morning terrors in a lyric slang nobody has matched, and he extends to every loser in it the dignity the world withholds.
The ending is darker than any film would allow, and the film proved it.
Around three hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want the underside of the American century written from inside, by its poet.
Historical Context & Significance
The Man with the Golden Arm won the first National Book Award for Fiction, in 1950, which puts Nelson Algren permanently at the head of the list this site indexes. His Chicago standing was already made, and his prose poem Chicago: City on the Make, which outraged Chicago's boosters on publication in 1951, is now its definitive portrait.
Otto Preminger's 1955 film gave Frank Sinatra one of his most celebrated roles and Algren nothing but grief: dropped as screenwriter, he sued, ran out of money, and answered a photographer who posed him under the marquee with the question of what that movie had to do with him. The film also recentred the story on addiction alone, and its notoriety, made outside the Production Code's drug ban, swallowed the novel's reputation.
Algren's decline is one of American letters' sore points: admired by Hemingway and loved by Simone de Beauvoir, he published his last novel in 1956 and died in 1981 nearly forgotten, since when the recovery of his standing has been slow, partisan and deserved.