Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs

My admiration for Jerzy Kosinski's Painted Bird and Nelson Algren's Walk on the Wild Side

Forget Hemingway, Melville, James

College professors strain to convince novitiates that the boring "masterpieces" of Western literature (Hemingway, Melville, James, etc.) deserve their reputations solely from the "test-of-time" standard. But I, for one, do not believe any worthwhile art work can be judged by reputation, consensus, or old age. That is why my admiration for two very different novels — Jerzy Kosinski's Painted Bird and Nelson Algren's Walk on the Wild Side - makes it impossible for me to value one over the other.

The novels are comparable only in their unrelenting depictions of humans as conniving but impotent carnivores, offered choices by an omniscient, uncaring puppeteer. The terrain covered in both is vast, the format is picaresque, but the conclusions drawn are identical: resigned despair.

In The Painted Bird you have the atrophied every-waif, hustled from parents to gypsies, superstitious fishwives, and lunatics during the Nazi scourge of East Europe. The child has no identity and cannot distinguish savagery from civility. The tale is told in cold, spartan narrative slices, devoid of emphasis. For once the "banality of evil" theme unfolds as a simple matter of fact. The incidents are cleansed of melodrama, and the documentation is spare: a child's eyes gouged from their sockets and crushed by a drunken behemoth's boots; an old crone douched with manure while crazed villagers revel in delirium; the constant dread of the approaching Nazi Huns.

Sponsored
Sponsored

It is a tract, but not a didactic one. Kosinski records but offers no editorials, which is perhaps what makes the work so eerie. He used the same technique for good novels such as Steps and Cockpit, a tentative one like Passion Play,; and a miserable one, Pinball. Good or bad, though, he broke his own spell: like the kid in The Painted Bird, he was incapable of feigning innocence. This is one of those rare gifts impossible to renounce or replicate.

That detached ingenuousness does not exist in Algren's Walk on the Wild Side. It is a self-conscious work on the level of the guttersnipe naturalism of Lewis, Dreiser, Wright, and Dos Passos. The transitions between rhapsodic narrative and the language of the dives, whorehouses, and halfway houses in New Orleans' French Quarter are, to put it delicately, jarring and upsetting. The novel's milieu is the hopeless world of the dispossessed. There is no promise of a better life for Algren's characters; but with that acknowledgment, the dim glimmer of hope, faith, and charity keeps them struggling to find a resolution. The vision is dark and desperate but all of a piece. And like Kosinski, Algren could never match this literary triumph. They say that writers are fortunate if they have one great book to deliver; Kosinski and Algren illustrate that presumption eloquently.

But these are not my sole candidates; here are the runners-up: Babbitt, Crime and Punishment, An American Dream, Crash, Going After Cacciato, The Second Coming, and The Long Goodbye. You may graciously 86 anything by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cozzens, Hardy, Ellman, James, and Wolfe (Thomas and Tom).

But I refuse to die before either the Chargers make the playoffs again or I understand the point of things like Absalom, Absalom!, Terra Nostra, the Koran, and Finnegans Wake.

I may live forever.

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

Reader Music Issue short takes

Obervatory's mosh pit, frenetic Rafael Payare, Lemonhead chaos, bleedforthescene, Coronado Tasting Room

College professors strain to convince novitiates that the boring "masterpieces" of Western literature (Hemingway, Melville, James, etc.) deserve their reputations solely from the "test-of-time" standard. But I, for one, do not believe any worthwhile art work can be judged by reputation, consensus, or old age. That is why my admiration for two very different novels — Jerzy Kosinski's Painted Bird and Nelson Algren's Walk on the Wild Side - makes it impossible for me to value one over the other.

The novels are comparable only in their unrelenting depictions of humans as conniving but impotent carnivores, offered choices by an omniscient, uncaring puppeteer. The terrain covered in both is vast, the format is picaresque, but the conclusions drawn are identical: resigned despair.

In The Painted Bird you have the atrophied every-waif, hustled from parents to gypsies, superstitious fishwives, and lunatics during the Nazi scourge of East Europe. The child has no identity and cannot distinguish savagery from civility. The tale is told in cold, spartan narrative slices, devoid of emphasis. For once the "banality of evil" theme unfolds as a simple matter of fact. The incidents are cleansed of melodrama, and the documentation is spare: a child's eyes gouged from their sockets and crushed by a drunken behemoth's boots; an old crone douched with manure while crazed villagers revel in delirium; the constant dread of the approaching Nazi Huns.

Sponsored
Sponsored

It is a tract, but not a didactic one. Kosinski records but offers no editorials, which is perhaps what makes the work so eerie. He used the same technique for good novels such as Steps and Cockpit, a tentative one like Passion Play,; and a miserable one, Pinball. Good or bad, though, he broke his own spell: like the kid in The Painted Bird, he was incapable of feigning innocence. This is one of those rare gifts impossible to renounce or replicate.

That detached ingenuousness does not exist in Algren's Walk on the Wild Side. It is a self-conscious work on the level of the guttersnipe naturalism of Lewis, Dreiser, Wright, and Dos Passos. The transitions between rhapsodic narrative and the language of the dives, whorehouses, and halfway houses in New Orleans' French Quarter are, to put it delicately, jarring and upsetting. The novel's milieu is the hopeless world of the dispossessed. There is no promise of a better life for Algren's characters; but with that acknowledgment, the dim glimmer of hope, faith, and charity keeps them struggling to find a resolution. The vision is dark and desperate but all of a piece. And like Kosinski, Algren could never match this literary triumph. They say that writers are fortunate if they have one great book to deliver; Kosinski and Algren illustrate that presumption eloquently.

But these are not my sole candidates; here are the runners-up: Babbitt, Crime and Punishment, An American Dream, Crash, Going After Cacciato, The Second Coming, and The Long Goodbye. You may graciously 86 anything by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cozzens, Hardy, Ellman, James, and Wolfe (Thomas and Tom).

But I refuse to die before either the Chargers make the playoffs again or I understand the point of things like Absalom, Absalom!, Terra Nostra, the Koran, and Finnegans Wake.

I may live forever.

Comments
Sponsored
Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

Navy solves San Diego homeless crisis by retiring four locally moored ships

Decommision Accomplished
Next Article

March is typically windy, Sage scents in the foothills

Butterflies may cross the county
Comments
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed Big Screen — Movie commentary Blurt — Music's inside track Booze News — San Diego spirits Classical Music — Immortal beauty Classifieds — Free and easy Cover Stories — Front-page features Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts Feast! — Food & drink reviews Feature Stories — Local news & stories Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore From the Archives — Spotlight on the past Golden Dreams — Talk of the town The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it Letters — Our inbox Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news News Ticker — News & politics Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated Poetry — The old and the new Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers Reading — The hunt for intellectuals Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds SD on the QT — Almost factual news Sheep and Goats — Places of worship Special Issues — The best of Street Style — San Diego streets have style Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves Theater — On stage in San Diego this week Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads Your Week — Daily event picks
4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs
Close

Anchor ads are not supported on this page.