[In the following excerpt taken from an essay in which Bluestone primarily discusses Algren's novels, the critic provides a mixed assessment of The Neon Wilderness, focusing on the story "Design for Departure."]

It is true that the stories [in The Neon Wilderness], like meditative finger exercises, explore situations and characters that have already become familiar. The drug addicts, petty thieves, prison inmates, small-time fighters, corrupt police, dypsos, winos, hobos and prostitutes—all are here. The boy in "The Brother's House" who discovers that he cannot return home looks back to Cass McKay; the drugged prostitute in "Is Your Name Joe?" to Steffi R. The fight between Legless Railroad Shorty and the bartender Fancy in "The Face on the Barroom Floor" will appear in A Walk on the Wild Side; "The Captain Has Bad Dreams" in The Man With the Golden Arm. As in Balzac's world, or Faulkner's, a character, once created, can crop up anywhere. But the stories, like the novels, are bound not so much by a common cast of characters as by a general background of disorder. The characters have a curious kind of horizontal mobility, capable of changing their physical location without ever changing their status. What makes this change impossible is less the entrapment of poverty than the destructive forces unleashed by the failure of love. Almost always there follows the kind of shocked somnambulism which is equivalent to living death. Sometimes the destruction is due to a moral weakness in the character (Baby Needles' rejection of Wilma in "Depend on Aunt Elly"), sometimes to caprice or bad luck (Mary's loss of Deaf Christiano in "Design for Departure"). But whatever the origin, love's destruction breeds a terrible kind of spiritual stasis, a curious kind of dreamlike, empty marking time for which terminal death is the only cure.

In two of these stories, however, the dominant pattern is reversed. Instead of love's annihilation ensuring death, redemptive love saves the characters from utter defeat. In "Stickman's Laughter," Banty Longobardi, after coming home to find his wife away, loses his entire paycheck in a night of drunken gambling. When he comes home shamed, he finds his wife ready to forgive him, ready to share responsibility for the loss. "My fault," she says, "I knew it was payday but I went out just the same." The love between them is still the crucial thing: "So nothing important had been lost after all." A similar situation is worked out in "He Swung and He Missed." In a sad, bitter-sweet kind of way, love salvages something for Young Rocco and Lili after their ironic defeat.

Interesting as exceptions, these pieces are not entirely convincing as stories. They lack the sustained narrative power of Algren's best prose, the felt starkness of his urban imagery. In their own way, they are as dissatisfying as the stories which, despite effective passages, exhibit no central development. Vignettes like "The Children" and "Pero Venceremos" are not so much organic narratives as elucidations of frozen situations. A merely static sketch remains impersonal.

On the other hand, the most successful stories are those which carry out Algren's obsessive pattern. In a world where social relations are based on parasitic oppression and brute survival, love is the only way in which human beings may meaningfully relate. Nothing else is finally reliable. That is why the ruin of love is inevitably disastrous. "Depend on Aunt Elly," "So Help Me," and "Design for Departure" are satisfying stories not because they are longest (they are that), but because they work out the pattern which consistently elicits Algren's verbal passion. In "Design for Departure," for example, the girl Mary spends her life searching for some human Christ to deliver her from lovelessness. Neglected by her father, and the harridan widow who lives with him, Mary leaves to make her way alone "in a twilit world between sleep and waking," first by working in a packinghouse, then by prostitution. Her first moment of human communion comes from Deaf Christiano, who first conquers her sexually and then makes her his mistress. Mary allows herself to be taken because, like Steffi, she cannot fight; she can only whimper and submit. But her submission turns to genuine love in response to Christy's unexpected kindness. The fact that Christy is an underworld character is not at all relevant for Mary. That he returns her love is all that really counts. Even Christy's act of feeding Mary drugs stems from a desire to keep her happy, to relieve her from the daily misery of their marginal lives. When Christy is taken away by the police, Mary cannot survive without him. During Christy's three year sentence, Mary becomes totally helpless and hopelessly degenerate. When Christy returns after his release, he finds her too far gone to save. Mary pleads for a dosage of narcotics strong enough to kill her, and Christy, after some hesitation, accedes to her wishes. In inverted Christian terms, Christy knows he is performing an act of mercy. Mary knows it too: "Then, like a bearer of peace, she heard Deaf Christiano's shuffling ascent up the Golgotha of the stairs." Without the single thread of love that has held her to this life, Mary is incapable of going on.

The denouement is terrible enough, but Algren's symbolism and imagery have carefully prepared it. In the birth-scar which Mary perpetually tries to hide ("that side of her face had a curiously dead aspect"); in her habit of sleeping in the foetal position; in the palpable doom of city imagery, Mary's fate becomes—except for her brief interlude with Christy—a kind of elaborate preparation for death. The best passages suggest this: "The night wind wandered past each night. The years closed in like a fog bank. Till the wind felt like someone crying, and the fog felt like a wall. While overhead, the city nights, above the endless maze of telephone wires, an ancestral moon looked calmly down, like the great moon of forever." It is an almost apocryphal vision of a timeless universe in which the only hope for a loveless life is the deliverance of death.

The fact remains, however, that most of the stories fall short of "Design for Departure." The total effect is a curious amalgam, reminiscent of the static, even paralytic, action that occurs between the novels' key events. The impression is uneven, like a fabric in which separate pieces of cloth have been loosely stitched together.