Sunday Morning! “Never Come Morning” by Nelson Algren

I keep thinking about something I read a few months back; my brain is like that, circling around these bits of half-remembered and half-eaten thoughtlets from books- fish food, let’s call it. This time the fish food was a comment from Lars Gustafsson’s novel Sigismund to the effect that the reason there are so many novels about bourgeois people is simply because they have a greater range of action. And, to be honest, it is hard to imagine a book in which a Wal-Mart greeter decides to leave her deadbeat husband, drain her savings traveling the world, and live, laugh, love!

Which is to say that one of my shopworn gripes about contemporary fiction could be… debatable, at least. I get bored, frankly, with novels about office workers or college professors and their philosophical questions. And I would personally love to see more novels about letter carriers or dump truck drivers. And so, my working theory has been that this boredom I feel when reading contemporary novels stems from the generational “professionalization” of fiction writing, which has certainly has produced a great deal of semi-interesting writing, and no masterpieces that come to mind.

But, I could be wrong in thinking that some return to the struggling low-rent writers of mid-century, a “proletarianization” of fiction writing, would lead to more engaging books. After all, I’ve known plenty of people who worked blue collar jobs and, usually, that was the least interesting part of their lives; and the thing that did the most to stultify and dull them. I’ve watched friends get ground down by labor jobs that never give back what you put in, and usually the only heroism that came out of that milieu was when someone quit… and then, they usually ran out of money, and had to get another stultifying job. Looking back, I always thought I’d get a novel out of my years as a janitor, and within a week of quitting, I couldn’t remember a thing about that time, aside from a pervasive atmosphere of frustrated dignity.

Work sucks, for the most part. And it’s hard to transmogrify work and poverty into art. One of the books I read recently, Never Come Morning, by Nelson Algren, probably did accomplish that feat- it is a great work of art- while not quite winning my heart. I respected it as a work of literature, but it didn’t quite get me to a place where I need writing to take me, that place that transcends the finite limits of human isolation. Which is probably asking a lot.

The story concerns a rising boxer named Bruno Bicek, from Chicago’s north side, and the girl he loves, Steffi, and how their love never quite saves them. They’re both very young and Bruno doesn’t quite know if he wants to be a hoodlum or a legitimate man, and he’s running with a gang of hoodlums while dreaming bigger dreams.

There’s a turning point though: when Bruno fails to stop a group of thugs from essentially gang-raping a very drunk Steffi, everything goes downward very quickly for both of them. He ends up under the thumb of a local crime boss, while she ends up one of his prostitutes. Much of the novel hinges on whether boxing will be their ticket out of this world, or if they’re just trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that’s harder to escape than classical fate.

Don’t judge the book by its glamorous cover.

The novel is brutal and honest; and it does get at the way we often do things without any clear understanding of why we did them, a trait that is maddening to watch in others, while being completely understandable when it’s us making the mistakes. But I also never felt like Bruno and Steffi might make it after all. The novel sort of hovers around the question of whether these two kids really do love each other, and I felt like they did by the end of the story. But a young man believes that love can conquer all, while an older man knows it’s just the thing that comes closest.

It’s a sad book and it’s truthful about people with fairly bleak prospects. But, it never quite did what similar stories by Hubert Selby Jr. do, which is to offer a glimpse of some door in the depths of these people that might be pushed open just an inch more and allow them to escape for real. Selby’s stories are devastating, I think, because the characters are almost through the door when the sledgehammer makes contact with the back of their head.

I’ve said it before somewhere else, but the thing I’m most haunted by is how much of our inner life is unknowable to others and largely unknowable to ourselves. Literature and art and poetry get us closer than anything else to making out the face at the bottom of the well. With Bruno and Steffi, it felt like their inner lives might be more barren than their surroundings. Which is probably truth. I just need something more. Ya know?

So, what are YOU reading, writing, watching, pondering, playing, or fighting against this weekend?