“Never a Lovely So Real” by Colin Asher
For many years my grandparents belonged to a small circle of people who called themselves the Sunset Club. They’d park their aluminum-and-plastic camping chairs on the beach in northwestern Indiana and watch the sky over Lake Michigan turn orange and heliotrope above the shoreline steel mills, their backs to vast sand dunes. These skies are so spectacular it is almost obscene, and visitors can enjoy the show in near-solitude because nobody expects the suburbs of Gary to be so stupid-beautiful. The Indiana Dunes finally became a national park this year, but it is still overlooked, and the broad stretches of fine sands can be completely empty at dusk. (You can also rent a ridiculously big lake house nearby for a genuinely distressing price.)
I say all this to explain, in part, why I was so delighted by Never a Lovely So Real, Colin Asher’s biography of the writer Nelson Algren, which is the only book I’ve ever read to mention the Dunes. Algren, who grew up in Chicago and spent most of his career writing about the city’s jankiest pockets and downtrodden inhabitants, had a summer home there. (I like to think that he would’ve liked the Sunset Club.) Like the Dunes, Algren is obscure for some reasons I understand and others I don’t.
Algren was admired by his contemporaries—Ernest Hemingway said he “beat Dostoyevsky,” Richard Wright was a dear friend, and Simone De Beauvoir was a longtime lover—but his best-selling novels from the 1940s and 1950s, including his best book, The Man With the Golden Arm, are not widely read today. He still had fans when he died in 1981, but he was Chicago-famous, not famous-famous. (I became familiar with him in high school when I was assigned to read his excellent essay/poem Chicago: City on the Make, but nobody knew who I was talking about when I brought him up in college.) Algren made proletarian literature that was actually stylistically interesting and fun to read, and this feels like the right time to reintroduce him to the canon—he loved scammers, gamblers, and failures of all stripes, and he hated capitalism!—and this biography is a great entry point.
Asher’s book gives Algren his proper due, finally, but it does more than that; I’d recommend it even to people who have no interest in reading Algren’s work, because it doubles as a pocket history of left-wing activism in post-World War II Chicago and triples as a very enjoyable literary gossip fest, as Algren was a bit of a messy bitch who lived for drama.
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I have something from the internet to recommend, as well. For Real Life, Alex Molotkow’s “Idol Thoughts” made me so happy for so many reasons. First, it’s partly about Elton John fandom, and as an unabashed Johnhead, I enjoyed the representation.
Alex also explained something I’ve long felt about how fandom functions, how it can be a very intimate thing, almost furtive. “We tend to intuit fandom as something collective — usually the term refers not to the state of being a fan, but of belonging to a community of people who are fans as well: loving the artist is a primary qualification, but just as important is learning the conventions through which that love is shared in common,” she writes. “My own experience of fandom has always worked in reverse: It’s not collectivity I’m after, but a version of privacy.” As someone who has often nurtured my most intense enthusiasms privately, I appreciated having this aspect of fandom articulated so clearly.
The essay then pivots to exploring the pleasure of collective fandom, too, and I dare you to read it without immediately finding some live music to see!
In the meantime, Elton: