A demanding and meandering trip, just like 'The Man With The Golden Arm' (which I loved), but this time around it was much harder to stay focused for some reason. Perhaps I need to try again when my head is less full.

I put this one off for a long time, knowing it was Algren's most popular, but then I kept encountering references to it involving Hunter Thompson. It is clearly the most outstanding of the 4-5 Algren books I've read. A brilliant feat of modernism, like a cross between Grapes of Wrath and Naked Lunch.

A gritty underworld couched in poetic prose—definitely worth the read.

Although I thought this one was overall less successful than Man with the Golden Arm, it's also quite a bit more colorful and ambitious, if perhaps so colorful at times that it comes off as absurd and, to me, that weakened the pathos of the sad tale of damaged outliers following their own tragic vices and destinies to horrific ends. But I suppose the tragedies I like best most people would slag off as "humorless," so perhaps the tone here was really terrific. It just rubbed me the wrong way at times and seemed to trivialize what, well, really is trivial: human existence. There's some beautifully poetic prose here to be sure, it just seems to get a little tangled up in its own greatness at times and seems to lose track of what it's saying. So what am I saying here? It was too good for its own good at times.

Besides the crackerjack prose (for good or ill) the book also fails as a novel in the modern sense. It generally follows its protagonist's sorry life (at best I guess you could call it a picaresque) but uses him mostly to connect a series of lovely character sketches, here and there falling out of sync with itself it seems, seeming to forget what it's already told us or to fill us in a little too late about some characters' details as if it needed one more draft to get all of the narrative passages into a more orderly and readable procession. All that poetic prose thus seems sort of incomplete as overwrought at once--another odd paradox.

Still, it is first and foremost about the only thing worth writing about in the USA: the anguish of our collective spiritual orphanhood and our damned lonely individuality, the core of every American tragedy. And every life is a tragedy for they always end in death.

If you want to read a book about down and out people who treat each other poorly, this may be the book for you. It's only redeeming quality is the author's beautiful use of language. Otherwise, it was too unrelentingly negative for me.

This book was written in a deliberately blurry fashion and you will feel like you're on drugs sometimes.. It was a tough read, but still interesting enough to keep me going. The characters are the reason to read - each one is a melting snowflake. Look fast before they're gone.

Dove Linkhorn and Kitty Twist are such memorable names, but unfortunately this book is mostly a re-write of earlier stories and his first novel. Charming in parts. Brutal in others. Mostly unfiltered hardship.

Not a great book by any means. Still, Lou Reed did seem to like the title.

Algren does a good job of building interest in these characters, but I found the reading a bit too slow for my taste. I couldn't get involved in the day to day goings on.

This was on my "New Orleans list" of books to complement a trip there. I struggled with how to rate this book. I enjoyed some aspects: I found Dove Linkhorn to be an unforgettable character who carries much of the book's dark humor through his dialogue, naive (but charming) optimism, and Huck Finn-style misadventures trying to make a buck in hard times. There is also some skillful and lovely prose, particularly in conveying the loneliness and desperation of the characters.

There's not much of a plot or traditional structure, and at times the writing feels wandering and without clear direction. While this style appropriately reflects the lives of the characters, it makes for a challenging read, and at times my own mind wandered to other places.

In the spirit of New Orleans, I'll compare my reading experience to listening to an extended jazz improvisation: I appreciated some elements of virtuosity, and undoubtedly some aficionados out there will hang on every note, but for me it wasn't consistently rewarding enough to keep me from wanting the band to move on to something else after a while.