the more important job, and the only reason Sparrow works the door at Schwiefka’s game is because Frankie put in a good word. Similarly, Sparrow is dating a woman from Frankie’s building, and he enjoys a line of credit at the Tug and Maul bar due to Frankie’s vouching for him. Sparrow’s whole life is a direct result of his proximity to Frankie. But when Sparrow gets to that room with the morphine, it slowly dawns on him, and the reader, that the relationship has flipped. Suddenly, the junkie Frankie Machine is looking up at Sparrow from the gutter. Frankie’s other relationships also deteriorate as his addiction grows. His relationship with his wife Sophie is pretty much ruined from the novel’s outset (Sophie suffers from paralysis, and Frankie blames himself for her condition even though her symptoms are mental rather than physical), but Frankie has a real chance at love with Molly-O the down-on-her-luck whore with a heart of gold next door. As Frankie falls deeper under the morphine’s spell, he loses Molly-O again and again. The novel’s best moments are when Frankie and Molly-O realize that their love is doomed. In the way of plot, there’s also a crime at the novel’s center, and much of the latter half of the novel involves Frankie running from the law. The truth though is that this is far from a suspense novel. It’s literary with a capital ‘L’ and at times, despite the grime, drugs, sex, murder, general mayhem and laugh-out-loud descriptions, the novel can be a bit of a grind. This is mostly due to the truly omniscient narrator, the enormous cast of characters, and the copious use of dialect. The sometimes complicated Polish names don’t help either. Toward the end of the novel, Sophie, who’s reflecting on her life in an insane asylum, lists almost everyone: “Sparrow. Vi. Stash. Rumdum. Zymgumnt. Old Doc D. Piggy-O. Nifty Louie. Umbrella Man. Cousin Kvorka. Record Head. Schwiefka. Chester from Conveyor. Meter Reader from Endless Belt. Widow Wieczorek. Jailer Schwabatski and Poor Peter. Francis Majcinek. We got married in a Church.” And not only do we have to keep all of those characters straight, but our omniscient narrator gives each one—and a few others—the chance to take the wheel before the novel is out. While this can be frustrating and confusing, in the end you can’t fault Algren for ambition. Sadly, despite the huge cast of characters, the end of the novel finds no one in a better place than they were at the beginning. But Algren does offer us one faint glimmer of redemption, in the form of poor Rumdum, the alcoholic dog. When Antek and Frankie meet at the end of the novel, Antek tells him that the “broken-wind hound is off the lush [...]. He goes for milk ‘n dog biscuit now ‘n brings home the newspaper instead of a bottle in his teeth.” As far as happy endings are concerned, that will have to suffice. C
60 | The CCLaP Journal