The American dream, and just what it meant is one of the great themes of 20th century American literature. The tragedy that the American dream is an illusion meant to distract everyone from the bleak reality of their lives is another common theme. Nelson Algren was one of the writers who explored the latter theme best. Algren was championed by Studs, and is the dedicatee of American Dreams: Lost and Found. He moved away from Chicago to New Jersey in 1975, and passed away in 1981 - the year after Lost and Found came out.
Robert O’Connor continues his series on Studs Terkel with his look at the American dream in American Dreams, Lost and Found.
Vladislavić recalls how his eyes once alighted on a photograph, now well-known, of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow. Here the death of the author brings about the birth of writing, with Walser’s fallen, frozen figure stirring Vladislavić to ‘write a story about the last days, hours, minutes of a writer.’ But the story dies on its feet, first dispersing into digressions, then disappearing completely, just as Walser’s footprints ‘break off in mid-sentence,’ and his collapse ‘carries him onto the silence of a blank page.’ Writing is like dying and being born both at once.
Post-expenses, Boris Johnson is the only contemporary politician to command near-universal public respect, his sex life could rival a Flashman or Don Draper, and he walks away laughing from controversies that would kill most public figures stone dead. Purnell’s biography can be read as a classic period entertainment, half the time you are just laughing at Boris’ antics and wondering what the loveable rogue will get up to next week. As Laurie Penny put it on the Daily Politics: ‘Sorry, it’s Boris, I still can’t believe he’s the Mayor of London, he’s a cartoon character… Every time I see his face on TV I go oh… oh, you’re Mayor…’ No one took him seriously until it was too late.
A pervasive trend in contemporary literature, most visible in the middlebrow but certainly not constrained within that region, doesn’t believe this, believing instead that empathy is an act of pure imaginative will. Take works with titles which follow the formula ‘The [slightly arty profession] of [name of war-torn city]’: perhaps The Bookseller of Kabul or The Cellist of Sarajevo, and I’m sure there are others. While the motive behind them is no doubt noble, they want to read modern history as a tale of localised goodies and baddies, in which the ‘human spirit’ ultimately wins out over, say, ‘greed’ or ‘corruption’ or ‘cruelty’. A Seventh Man, by contrast, is as convincing an argument for a Marxist humanism as ever there was: it sticks determinedly to its thesis that ‘understanding’ demands that imaginative resolve is accompanied by an understanding of objective processes.
Perilous Passage is no biography, and certainly no map through the invisible landscape, but Wilson’s own vision of events surrounding this extraordinary apprenticeship and initiation into The Third Mind – a psychic phenomenon of conjoined minds noted by Burroughs and Gysin during their experiments in the Beat Hotel in the 50s and 60s. In his words: “I am not so much trying to detail a teaching method… but rather to describe the effects of what he called the Process on those concerned, most particularly myself.” Transmuted into a tale of espionage, masks disguise the central players, dialogue obscures as much as it reveals and locations blur together outside of time.
If James Sallis’ totemic Driver seemed somehow superhuman in the original Drive, then in its sequel, things have evolved even further. In Driven, the now-Nietzschean wheelman becomes all too real, all too human, yet achieves greater impact this time through his perceived weakness and vulnerability, rather than raw strength and power. That isn’t to say there isn’t as much violence or throat-kicking to be had. Sallis maintains his style of filmic time signatures and underplayed delivery and, by working in a love interest, several new faces, and even a new identity, builds exhilaratingly on the mythology of his soon-to-be-timeless Zarathustra. 
There’s a need for left-wing politics, for understanding ourselves as human animals on a planet where the incredible mammalian brain has the potential to solve how we can live together in peace and harmony with our world. Churchland and her naturalist posse keep slamming down the facts and the theories. We need to keep lapping it up, learning it, arguing with it, finding out more and more and get it put to good use to protect or hospitals, our schools, our communities, we need to abolish poverty and war. We need to get with the programme.
