My holiday reading

John Kelly

A Walk on the Wild Side was never intended to be Nelson Algren’s finest work. The plan was to write for the “pocketbook traffic”, make some money and then flee to Paris and Simone de Beauvoir. But none of it turned out that way.

An angry, funny and brave book, it’s the story of Dove Linkhorn, a drifter who finds all manner of unconventional employment in the brothels, peep shows and speakeasies of New Orleans, which I’ve visited on a few occasion, pre- and post-Katrina.

Of course, I didn’t read the book in these precise locations, but even so.

In the Big Easy, even in the most salubrious of surroundings, you know you’re never far from trouble.

When Dove appeared in print he was not a welcome hero. Nor were Legless Schmidt, Kitty Twist and all the rest of the “wingies, dingies, zanies and lop-sided kukes, cokies and queers and threadbare whores”. Time magazine attacked Algren’s “sympathy for the depraved”, but his actual offence was in lines like this one: “When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough.” And I didn’t need to be in New Orleans for a line like that.

In conversation with Sara Keating

John Kelly is a broadcaster and writer. His novel From Out of the City is due from Dalkey Archive Press next year