Fiction and Anger

I write about poor people—petty thieves, working stiffs, the homeless—ordinary, everyday poor people. A few years ago, Sean Bernard pointed out, in a review of one of my books in these pages, that my work was not about the homeless who attended Juilliard, nor about poor people with Tourette’s, but rather about regular, run-of-the-mill poor people.

In contemporary fiction, there are very few books about the poor. Myriad reasons account for this lacuna: changes to the publishing industry, lack of interest/lack of sales, a different political milieu. Undeniably, the nation has moved rightward. Nixon was a more progressive President than Obama. Writers now need MFAs to get published. These largely irrelevant degrees cost a hundred grand. We now have many Henry James’s, very few Floyd Dell’s, or Tom Kromer’s.

Nor do we have a neo-Nelson Algren—train-hopping hobo and Simone de Beauvoir’s lover—the epitome of the working class intellectual.

My line of thinking here owes a debt not only to Sean Bernard, but also to Eric Miles Williamson, whose book Oakland, Jack London and Me (2007) is the best work I know about impoverished writers writing about their own.

Back in the day, Algren was lionized, and then vilified. He wrote about the working class during the McCarthy era, and was spied upon and ostracized.

His characters were considered “colorful”—the wild side of New Orleans and junkie card dealers in Chicago. These folks were the casualties of the failure of the American Dream in the aftermath of World War II. In 1949, Algren won the first National Book Award; a few years later, he was under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

In 2015, we simply ignore such writers and writing—as we do the poor.

Stephen Gutierrez is a good writer. He writes about the poor. Not Poles and Italians like Algren, but Mexicans, Chicanos, in Fresno and Los Angeles.

In Gutierrez’s story, “The Big Fresno Fair” (2010), a nice Latino family attends the County fair. They play carnival games and eat cotton candy. When the tough guys show up—tatted up vatos, well-coifed Morrissey fans, cussing their heads off—the family folks exit in fear.

The poor are afraid of the poor. Not the cops, not anti-Communist witch hunters, but rather their own alter egos—their own children, in fact.

And that’s how it is now—rather than get angry, they fear anger, and then turn in rage on their own. Just the way the powerful want it to be.

In another Gutierrez story, called “The Mexican Man in His Backyard” and subtitled “A Fable of Sorts” (2014), an educated (presumably Chicano) husband and father takes an interest in his neighbors—a Native American and “a Mexican.” After a dinner “of sorts,” the educated man returns home to his wife, excited about his multicultural new barrio. A traffic accident occurs. The “Mexican Man” helps with translation. Afterwards, “the Mexican man went back into his house.…He continued to ignore me. He didn’t care.” That’s the last line—“he didn’t care.”

The Ancient Greeks used the word “idiot,” not to depict the mental capacity of a person, but rather to describe a “private person,” lacking a public life—a citizen who did not participate in politics. Picking up on Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), writes about the need for both a robust private life and a vigorous public life. We live in times where the latter is lacking, particularly among the poor. As Gutierrez writes: “He didn’t care.”

In the 1990s, Kurt Cobain sang: “Here we are now, entertain us!” The powers that be sure heard the call: Dish TV, Facebook, soap operas, sports, 500 channels, Instagram, Twitter, selfies galore.

During his early career, Nelson Algren wrote in a public space that was a place of and for radical politics. Algren, Richard Wright, William Saroyan and many others were members of the left-leaning John Reed Club. Algren’s biographer, Bettina...