A not entirely honest waltz

That’s how it rolls: if the characters are poor, it’s “social realism.” If their lives are described and their hardships revealed, it’s “merely real.” And if the writer of these books has not experienced every ounce of it himself, “he did not exactly live it.”

Two other great excerpts from this awesome essay by Andrew O’Hagan:

“Nelson Algren comes like a corvette or even a big destroyer when one of those things is what you need,” Hemingway said, “and need it badly and at once and for keeps.” He wrote inside his own copy of The Man with the Golden Arm, “OK, kid, you beat Dostoyevsky. I’ll never fight you in Chicago. Ever.”

and

He went mad, he nearly drowned, and, in later life, he became a kind of hack and a clownish shadow of his genius self. “He had been promised one world and then found himself in quite a different one,” Beauvoir said of him, “a world directly opposed to all his convictions and all his hopes.”

Andrew O’Hagan: “Singing the Back Streets”, New York Review of Books - (link)