[In the following review of The Last Carousel, Maloff faults Algren's overblown prose, his self-indulgence, and the repetitive nature of the stories in the volume.]

No writer has been more relentlessly faithful to his scene and cast of characters than Nelson Algren. His scene is the "wild side," the "neon wilderness," the seamier sprawls of Chicago and its spiritual extensions across this broad land—America as Chicago. And his characters are the drifters and grifters, clowns and carnies, pimps and pushers, hustlers and hookers, gamblers and touts, junkies and lushes, marks and victims, conmen and shills, freaks and grotesques—the born losers who constitute a half-world, an anti-society to the society that never appears, not even as a sensed or felt presence, in Algren's work. Over the four decades of his life as a writer, scene and characters have never changed. Atmosphere, obsessions, talk, ways of putting in the time—all are fixed, held in suspension, dreamed and long after hazily recalled, caught not as they once were but as they are remembered, just as they are about to dissolve and become ballads. The mythical time, whatever the calendar reads, is always the '30s, somewhere around the longest year of 1935.

Except when it's time for settling old scores. Since The Last Carousel is for the most part an ingathering of magazine pieces, many of them from the pages of Playboy, anything goes. So Algren allows himself yet another unpleasant portrait of Simone de Beauvoir and some small diversions in the form of vendettas—against Alfred Kazin in particular and critics in general; the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in particular and, in general, workshops and other forms of corrupting the young and suspectible. As these and some other self-indulgent pieces do evident violence to the prevailing unity of tone and subject, the internal pressure to include them must have been tremendous. They succeed largely in getting off some cheap shots, though some of the objects so richly deserve savaging, one can't wholly begrudge the author these incidental pleasures, any more than one can deny him the pleasures of some fine childhood reminiscence, or of recording racetrack, baseball and boxing lore, in which Algren, in his best moments, is incomparably if lachrymosely good.

But the book takes its echoing tone from Algren's chronic weakness for "fine" writing, the kind of overblown elegaic lyricism—tremulous, quivering, cadenced, or wistful, celebratory, nostalgic, poignant—that used to be called prose-poetry. It was widely practiced by sensitive young writers in conscious quest of an American demotic voice some suitable song for the open road—the endless, receding plains, prairies, rivers of the imagined West. Of that chorus, Algren's voice was the most prominent and is the longest lasting, the others have long since faded. Decidedly a literary manner, it came on aggressively anti-literary: tough-tender and bittersweet, sentimental and swaggering, robust, keen-eyed, sprung from the soil, epic, open to the full spectrum of American experience, defiantly outside the mainstream of literary modernism and contemptuous of it, a strong dose of salts for the university wits and nancies—in short a species of literary populism and native romanticism, a nervously American preoccupation of the '30s.

The trouble with "style," with any strongly marked literary manner, is that it can become its own object of contemplation. Algren has always been a gifted yarn-spinner, a teller of tall tales and manner as to be finally strangled by them. Helplessly our sorely strained attention shifts from story and character. Typically the story outgrows its limits, expands, without warrant, toward legend. Characters degenerate into "colorful characters"; and our attention, having been thus wrenched from its ostensible objects, centers on the evocative voice of the poet singing of summer with full-throated ease. Not a page is free of it.

Even in self-mockery it is enamored of itself. Take a random example. In "Come In If You Love Money," a piece set in Butte—which is, and always has been, more legend than city—and populated with appropriately colorful characters (bawdy, colorful madame and her girls, beery poker-players and such central-casting types) we get

a place where winds blow all day beneath the earth; where narrow rails cut through volcanic rock, bearing drivers, begoggled and gaunt, whose only light is borne by a battery attached to a helmet of steel. Five thousand feet beneath the Butte Country Club, blood-colored streams stagnate between automatic ramps. A spatter of copper sulphate, in the ominous overhand, winks in the gloom like a handful of mischievous stars.

A colorful background and underground for colorful characters; and soon after a full bursting into rollicking ballad:

As I walked out on the night-streets of Montana, as I walked out in old Butte one foul night, I saw more dread-the-dawn dingbats looking for a doorway . . . more quivering, quaking, transfixed and trembling, catatonic, stoned and zonkified drunks looking for a park bench than I'd ever seen on Chicago's North Clark Street. I saw more pensionless and emphysemized voyeurs kibitzing the lightless corners than I'd ever seen on West Division Street.

In passages of recitative, strewn among the arias, the throttled narrative somehow advances, haltingly. The game of poker is played out; the chips are gathered in. But if song not story is the point of all this, how else to end it save with a cadenza:

Deadpan Jack murdered me and Deadpan Jack will murder you. / And Butte, Montana, is a town where everyone finds his own Deadpan Jack. / Since the times when the gold came easy. And flesh was still not dear. When fists were the thing that mattered most. / Yet money mattered more.

The collection includes actual quasiballadic verse: "Epitaph: The Man with the Golden Arm," "Ode to an Absconding Bookie," "Tricks Out of Times Long Gone"; but always the prose aspires to that state, so that, disconcertingly, the movement from time to time comes to a full stop to allow space for the insertion of verses before movement toward status can be resumed. Or, as in "Moon of the Arfy Darfy," a racetrack piece (a literary subject solely owned by Algren), the prose ends, or runs out, and is transmuted or consummated in a verse or doggeral equivalent:

When toteboard lights go blind with dusk / And other losers have gone home / Above the grandstand's damps and glooms / A moon of the backstretch on the wane / Sees a rider whose silks are long outworn.

Riding into the neon sunset, dissolving into the gloaming of legend.

Algren is a maverick of American letters: a solitary, impervious writer in possession of a true though narrow talent whose feeling runs richest only when it is touched by

all those whose lives were lived by someone else / Come once again with palms outstretched to claim / What never rightly was their own;

by the

tarts out of times long gone, [by] Boothbroad, bluemoon cruiser, coneroo / Drifters of no trade whose voices, unremembered / Complain continually among the cables overhead. . . .

Now tarts, with all due respect, may have hearts of gold, and no doubt they—together with drifters of no trade—have stories to tell; but their stories are few in number, drab in texture, small in scope—and, in the nature of things, somewhat similar in tone and substance. Algren, our only poet of the lumpen proletariat, is the rambling minstrel of times that never were and are now long gone. He alone has remembered their voices and restored their lives. In order to make them memorable, the stuff of lore, figures in the American landscape, he provides the amplification, with reedy winds, often one lonesome oboe, off-key, and augmented strings, some of them snapped.