Colin Asher's Never a Lovely So Real is a detailed, highly readable biography of the Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, known for works such as The Neon Wilderness (1947), The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). Throughout, Asher advances an argument that Algren's career suffered because of the FBI's surveillance of him during America's “Red Scare” of the 1940s and 1950s. While Asher's descriptions are thick, his argument is weak.

Asher first establishes Algren's roots in the American working class of early twentieth-century Chicago. As the young son of a machinist, Algren was fascinated with sports, street fighting, and newspapers, with cars and speakeasies to follow during his teen years in the 1920s. While in college, Algren was conflicted, as he tried to live the life of a Stoic, yet he also attempted to visit local brothels, but was repulsed by them. After college and unemployed, Algren rode the rails and hitchhiked during the Great Depression, collecting the material that became his first proletarian novel, Somebody in Boots (1935).

Asher next highlights Algren's participation in the Federal Writer's Project of the 1930s, his at times loveless and sexless marriage to Amanda Kontowicz, and his service in the army during the final months of World War II. The 1930s were the formative time in Algren's artistic development, as he decided to make Chicago his subject matter – its doomed, damned, and dispossessed. The result was his second novel, Never Come Morning (1942). What piques one's imagination here is two of Algren's friendships, one with Richard Wright, and the other, albeit briefly, with Martha Gelhorn, Hemingway's third wife. Talented people recognized Algren's talent. The reader craved to know more.

Out of the army and back in Chicago, Algren began his love affair with Simone de Beauvoir, while immersing himself in an urban “underworld” composed of gamblers, prostitutes, and morphine addicts. He drew on these latter experiences for, notably, The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Asher then fleshes out the extent of the FBI's surveillance of Algren, as it's his contention that this surveillance (but actual interference?) caused Algren to make career missteps that led to depression and debt. Asher undermines his position, however, when he later informs us that the FBI – due to insufficient evidence – closed its file on Algren and decided not to prosecute him for perjury regarding his supposed membership in the Communist Party.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Algren experienced a brief rebound as a writer, and although he failed to rekindle his romance with de Beauvoir, he married (but then divorced), Betty Ann Bendyk, a much younger woman. And as he did throughout his life, Algren wandered from his home base in Chicago, traveling to Paris, South Korea, Hong Kong, and even South Vietnam. Algren's wandering continued in the 1970s, when he abandoned Chicago for, first, Paterson, New Jersey, then Hackensack, and finally Sag Harbor, Long Island. During those years, Algren was immersed in writing about Reuben “Hurricane” Carter, a black boxer convicted of murder, with Algren championing Carter's innocence while hoping, once again, for a resurgence of his own career. Before that could happen, Algren died in May of 1981, two weeks before he was to be inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

At times, Asher makes annoying errors regarding Chicago geography (he has Algren and de Beauvoir crossing a canal that doesn't exist), Chicago politics (he refers to a prominent, independent alderman and friend of Algren's as Len Despres, when his first name was Leon), and world history (Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not bombed on the same night, nor in that order). Further, Asher often adds a level of subjective description that seems improbable. Is he paraphrasing a source, or is he using his imagination to embellish the text? And while Asher claims that most of his sources can be found online, he undercuts this by saying in his notes that other, and important, materials are, for all practical purposes, solely in his possession. How can this material be verified by another researcher?

Despite Asher's considerable efforts, Algren remains an enigmatic character and not a very sympathetic one. He often appears to be mentally unstable, incapable of making career decisions, and unable to sustain relationships. In his introduction, Asher dismisses what others have advanced concerning Algren's decline – alcoholism, gambling, writer's block, an audience that had moved on from his proletarian prose – yet these factors cannot be dismissed, as we see them playing out throughout his adult life. There is another plausible reason for Algren's decline: one can only descend into the “underworld” so many times before one loses the ability to ascend. Ask Orpheus.