10. A Cool Million

Satire is one of my favorite literary genres. It serves the essential function of violently exploding our comfortably unexamined preconceptions, which allows us to then reexamine them and really change, and at its best it does so with a subtlety and artfulness that flabbergasts and delights. A Cool Million is a shining example of bitterness, anger, and outright contempt being channeled productively into satire. 

 

The novel surgically dismembers each and every aspect of “The American Dream;” any notion of American Exceptionalism living in a reader’s head will either be destroyed or emerge stronger than ever for having grappled with it. It creates a cartoon America that functions first and foremost on Murphy’s Law: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. It exposes how much ideas like social mobility, the rags-to-riches-myth, and even the dignity of the Office of the President of the United States depend on simple dumb luck rather than any inherent power of the American spirit. 

 

And as a central American myth, The Road is not safe. Travel in this novel means entering a den of pickpockets and con men, risking death, imprisonment, and even enslavement. West’s Road deliberately challenges the popular conceptions of the day. Rather than the mystical scrying-pool-of-the-nation popularized by the travel writers of the era, any information gained during travel in A Cool Million is more likely a grifter’s lie than a nugget of honest, down-home truth. The Odyssean sea of challenges presented by Steinbeck is transformed to a sadistic deathtrap from whose maw no man or woman emerges whole. The various cultures America contains are reduced to brand names: All-American prostitutes themed for their region and Rustic Country Dwellings bought and shipped whole to New York design showrooms. 

 

Though the perils of the road trip and the falseness of the American Landscape are just two tiles in the vast sea of misery that is America in A Cool Million. The real target here is The American Dream. The Horatio Alger myth that “anyone can make it in America.” The point of the book is to shout, angrily and with little flecks of spittle flying out, that rhetoric is just words. Saying that “America is the greatest country on Earth,” or “Anyone can make it in America” doesn’t magically make poverty or crime disappear, it doesn’t alter the rules of probability just because the dice were rolled on American soil. And the probability is that your life is going to be horrible and you will die alone, no matter what passport you carry.

 

A good, concise message. And a true one, even if it is a little depressing.

It is surprisingly easy to speak a hell of a lot, and to actually say very little. This fact is used and abused by individual politicians, entire governments, and everyday folks alike. Nathanael West does a pretty great job of demonstrating this in his satirical piece A Cool Million. One of my favorite instances of this can be seen early in the novel, when the narrator is talking about Nathan “Shagpole” Whipple and his famous line, “Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” (71). This phrase comes with the elusive atmosphere of an “adage,” but the meaning is ridiculous. It supposedly means “Don’t let the pleasures of the body cause you to spend too much money” – but there is no association at all, is it simply some epic, deeper meaning attached to random words arranged to sound like something significant.

The way Whipple gives his speech (for which only a lone boy scout unwillingly shows) is also obviously satirized in its patriotic tone to the level of being, quite frankly, cheesy. He uses phrases like “gorgeous folds” and “tattered fragments” and “clouds of war,” which are just far too perfect examples of the sentimental tones often adopted in political speeches to make everyone feel satisfactorily sympathized with.

I am curious to learn a bit more about the general public’s reaction to this book, as it is clearly satirizing many of the picture-book American images that were essentially shattered during this period. I thought it was striking (and kind of fantastic) that the “hero” and “heroine” of the novel both follow the stereotypical journey away from their small towns into the big city, but in the most twisted ways possible. Lem finally ends up with a pegleg and a missing eye and gets shot in the chest, while Betty is kidnapped and sold into “white slavery” (I like the specification that it is white slavery, just in case we got confused…). It’s such a great slap in the face for the age-old “American Dream” of the poor kid who stumbles through some rough times, yet comes out on top with “a cool million.”

I feel a lot of people realized during this time that the idea of the “American Dream” sounded more like a nice story to bridge the incredible gap between socioeconomic classes than a reality; West expresses this rather artfully. I love the last scene in the book, where Lem is being celebrated in honor of him being a true “American boy.” It is the ultimate culmination of the ironic nature not only of the novel but of the reality of the times.

A Cool Million: the Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin depicts an exaggeratedly doomed American tale.  The protagonist suffers relentless misfortunes on every front-- he is hassled by the legal system, robbed, exploited, and even his own physical form and his girlfriend are ruined.  How improbable that Pitkin should carry on, with the American dream beating on absurdly in his heart-- it is of course a farce, a takeoff of the prevalent bootstraps-y tales of the era.  In an especially postmodern stroke, according to Gary Scharnhorst's "From Rags To Patches, or A Cool Million As Alter-Alger", West lifted passages without alteration from Alger stories.  For anyone who would recognize the excerpting of those other novels, the spoofing would be especially blatant, and a reconsideration of those optimistic tropes would be all the more immediate.  The unadorned, unaltered appropriation of existing text, simply recontextualized in a new novel, is an action that confused some critics, but was pretty innovative, whether it accomplished its goal for all of its audience or not. 
 
In a way, the satire works on a second level.  Beyond being amused by the exaggerated misery befalling the protagonist, a reader might pause to consider that it is potentially strange to derive pleasure from reading these horrors, and experiencing them at a safe distance.  This points out the sort of strange politics of many of the texts we've engaged, which can verge on exploitive voyeurism and, dare I call it, poverty pornography, made for a middle class audience with an inexhaustible fascination with the truly destitute.  Perhaps a reader experiencing dissonance about enjoying this novel would recognize that the acceptability of such depictions in non-humorous settings is just as questionable, or at least worth being conscious of.  

Nathaniel West serves up a hilarious parody-satire, and it is a good deal of fun as Fred Marsh points out. While it certainly does evoke the same sensibility, and twisted sense of humor as Voltaire's Candide, it also evokes the sensibility of a different body of art. I could not help but think of American cinema from the early 1900s, and particularly the Great Depression, that depict dead-pan, downtrodden characters, such as Charlie Chaplin, and the Groucho Brothers, that simply cannot catch a break. Chaplin depicted the tramp, always trying to catch a break, and the Marx brothers depicted a grim future of the country through their comedic portrayal of the failure of our government. These Vaudeville films always relied on the misfortune of the protagonist for the enjoyment of the audience. Although these films were meant to serve as comedic relief during the Great Depression, they can be almost depressing when viewed in retrospect, because the viewer sees what a dark sense of humor people enjoyed at the time. Also, as Marsh points out in his article the narrative relies on the spectacle of Pitkin’s physical pain for the reader’s kicks. Pitkin buys into the American Dream, and believes that he can rise to the upper crust of society by his own bootstraps. This is a common theme that we have seen characters exude, even when the idea seems so unrealistic in relation to their situation. Ultimately, after struggling, and failing to to be a good, successful, blue blooded capitalist, “His whole life stands for the ideals of the Fascist National Revolutionary party bent on restoring the lore and legendry of the plain American people and ridding our fair land of sophistication, Marxism, international capitalism and other sinister alien forces and elements.”, against his own wishes.(Marsh) Pitkin’s life seems like one of the most harsh existences one can imagine, just like that of Candide. At least Candide was able to retire to the cultivation of his garden, but Pitkin is subjected to a legacy in death that he did not want, which is a pretty twisted end. The conflicting thing about stories like A Cool Million and Candide, is that the reader feels a sense of guilt for genuinely enjoying and being amused by the protagonists’ misfortunes. Ultimately, I think that this form of parody, utilitizing severe violence as comedy, provides effective commentary on the time periods that they deal with. The prevailing sense of optimism that the American Dream was still alive, and that people could overcome the rampant poverty during the Great Depression was largely false. The marketing of this idea to the American people only served to delude the impoverished people that clung to it, and West provides a powerful counter-balancing effect to the works of people like Horatio Algers.

Reading A Cool Million by Nathanael West is like watching the Saw movie series; you see the main figure broken down and dismembered, but hey, at least you get a laugh out of it.

West’s A Cool Million hits on a theme we’ve been getting at with our recent Guthrie Bound for Glory and Kromer Waiting for Nothing pieces, and that is the recognition of the failed American Dream. Changing course from Guthrie’s fictitious hyperbole and Kromer’s complete despair, A Cool Million epitomizes the coalescing literary balance of reality’s tragic humor.

A Cool Million’s Lemuel Pitkin, the short novel’s protagonist, is the young boy caught in the middle of many of the book’s agonies as he is the anti-Horatio Alger; i.e. the boy who’s fallen and can’t get up. He sets out on the advice of his admired elders to make money to save his family home from being repossessed. But this isn’t the story of a young scout making his fortune through hard work and sheer determination like Horatio, but rather of the one Lem each of us has in our lives; the friend who trusts everyone and everything, tells you that they love you but then smashes your heart to pieces on limo ride to prom by saying she slept with the entire offensive line. Just me? Sorry.

Throughout the story Lem trusts the insight of his elders, especially the weird Mr. Shagpoke Whipple who leads him in the wrong direction nearly every single time. Lem’s lack of consciousness and awareness of the greed and deceit of others is astounding and truly makes the story. Lem loses his money, over and over, but he loses his eye, his teeth, his thumb, his leg and his scalp, but never his blind hope; the same cannot be said for his dignity. All in all, Lem’s mishaps seem to occur in a very well-defined microcosm of society, so much so that it lacks the breadth of depravity many of our previous works display. West’s Lemuel seems to represent the harshness of living rather than the harshness of Depression U.S.

After losing track of Whipple and being “shot at several times,” Lem makes his way over to catch a train bound “northeast.” There we see the tried individualism of Lem’s situation wrapped up in West’s comical black humor.

“Unfortunately, all his money had been lost in the opera house fire and he was unable to pay for a ticket. The conductor, however, was a good-natured man. Seeing that the lad had only one leg, he waited until the train slowed down at a curve before throwing him off.”

It’s situations like these that are affronts to Horatio Alger where I lose the ‘call to action’ fervor that pieces like Kromer’s and Steinbeck’s are able to mobilize so well. The individualized plight and accompanying humor of West’s piece serves to bring the troubles of life into the forefront, but lacks the powerful agency to make it a tour de force in an era of Dorothea Langes and Woodie Gutries. Where West engages his audience in hackneyed views of life, he loses the magnitude of the Depression and its impact on the landscape for all.

A Cool Million is the unfortunate story of Lemuel Pitkin, who sets of with the utmost candor and spirit to make his fortune, only to be met at every turn with absurdly poor fortunes. He is nobly inspired to help ease his mother’s financial woes, and under the tutelage of the racist nationalist ex-president is slowly hacked to bits and martyred for a cause he was never tremendously fond of.
 
Both the style and substance of the book struck me as similar to that of Voltaire’s Candide. Both stories are very fast-paced, and tell the tale of a young protagonist facing ever-increasingly horrifying problems with great aplomb. The tales are also both highly satirical, with A Cool Million poking fun at a great many facets of the American lifestyle. For instance, the racism of the novel is so overbearingly blatant and the characterization of Mr. Whipple so brash one can be reasonably confident it’s meant entirely in parody (although Poe’s Law is certainly applicable). The central joke is of course the absurdity of the American Dream. Pitkin literally gives himself to the cause and the one who seems to profit from it is the almost völkisch fascist of Mr. Whipple. In this supposed American utopia, women are regularly treated as nothing more than playthings and whores, law enforcement is brutal and at the mercy of Tammany Hall-style corrupt lawyers and judges, the macho Western cowboy is a greedy, violent psychopath, and the Southern recruits to Mr. Whipple’s new world order lynch a friend of the party because they mistake his race. Obviously, none of these things are desirable in the utopian land of opportunity.
 
Lemuel Pitkin is abused throughout the book for others’ gain, but his enterprising spirit seems to manage to constantly turn lemons into lemonade. While he may have had his teeth pulled out, losing his dentures saved him from unsavory relations with an Indian john. He is hired to his final post specifically because of his physical deformities, and he finds his joy in life during this period by reading the newspapers that are used to beat him for the show. There’s something to be admired in his constantly irrepressible spirit, but by the end of the story it all seems so utterly absurd. Contrasted with all the other readings for the class thus far, the upshots of which have been utterly bleak, there’s a sort of peace to be found in Pitkin’s unassailable resolve. Sure, his life was horrifying by any metric, and perhaps Nathaniel West sought out to poke fun at the idea of limitless composure, but in the midst of his ridicule, Pitkin’s hopefulness came off as rather appealing. While the world may be horrible, it is the only one in which one exists, and therefore the only one at present possible. Pitkin always tries to make it his best of all possible worlds.  

A Cool Million is the tale of a young boy of fifteen who sets out to make enough money to save his mother’s house, but end up losing not only the house, but also his teeth, and eye, a leg, a thumb, his scalp, dignity, and finally his life.  What amuses me so much, however, is the way in which Nathanael West ridicules the Horatio Alger story while having lived a sort of Horatio Alger story himself.  Born to a Jewish family, he resented his heritage and the way in which he was tormented for his ethnicity. While he failed high school, through cunning he forced his way into Brown, and while he was rejected from all fraternities he became a famous author.  True, in the end he was unfortunately killed in an automobile accident at the age of 37, but he accomplished what many work towards their whole lives, and he started out poor no less. According to the article by Walden, West believed that the way to success was through “cunning, craft, power, fraud, and aggression” and in many ways these were the methods West used to reach the top.  Cunning and fraud were used to get into college, power came with a degree from Brown, and craft can clearly be seen in his numerous published works, which might have brought him to the top.  Shagpoke Whipple would have been proud.

There’s no doubt that Nathanael West seems somewhat unhappy.  At least we can say that he is unhappy with the “American Dream” and the ways in which it is propagated. In thinking about his personal unhappiness, however, I came to wonder how much the stereotypes and racism were necessary and how much was true racism self-hatred.  His disdain for his own heritage and the way in which he portrays stereotypical minorities is quite jarring and I don’t know if they were exactly crucial to the point he was making.  All of these terrible things would have easily happened without mention of the evil Chinaman who sells innocent porcelain-skinned American girls into prostitution, or brutal ‘Indians’ who scalp people and Southerners who are brainless and run amok lynching folks.  It seems to me that the story would have worked perfectly well without these stereotypes, as that is not exactly the point of the Horatio Alger story. 

Additionally, I thought it was interesting that while West hints at the cause of the extreme poverty plaguing the nation in his story, he doesn’t exactly talk about the extreme widespread poverty in the country, but makes it seem as though there is poverty because Lem just can’t get a break and because New York City is full of scumbags.  It seems to me as though this novel could have taken place at any time in the past hundred years, not just during the Depression.  Doesn't it seem as though A Cool Million is simply a sarcastic and pessimistic complaint about life in general? 

Reading Nathaniel West's A Cool Million, it nearly seems that the only decent person in the world is the book's hero, Lemuel Pitkin. In past readings we had seen a general wariness toward strangers and law enforcement, who varied in their level of honesty and philanthropy. West displays almost no variance, however. Every poet is a pickpocket, every well dressed man is framing you for a crime, every cowboy is shooting an Indian and eating all of your food, and every cop is about to bash your head in. Betty can't go anywhere without being raped or sold into prostitution, and Lem can't go anywhere without being thrown in jail or suffering horrific injuries. The southern town of Beulah erupts into a riot full of rapists, arsonists, murderers, and secessionists incited by a mere two-minute speech from a man who just arrived that day. The Indian chief Israel Satinpenny put it well when he told his warriors that, "riot and profaneness, poverty and violence are everywhere. The gates of pandemonium are open." Even Jake Raven's propaganda museum "The Chamber of American Horrors" doesn't stray too much from the reality of West's world. 

Though very gruesome, West's satire piece on American success does the job of providing a comedic relief from the perils of society while simultaneously making readers more aware of depressing issues. Much like The Onion, it uses hyperbole to subtly remind the its audience that many aspects of American life lie somewhere in between the glamour of the media's usual portrayal and the post-apocolyptic vision of America in A Cool Million. As for West's over-the-top depiction of the everyday American, there's no need to make any of the bleak portrayals of America and its people subtle, for it is in West's crass absurdity that we find humor. It's almost like the novel version of one of those stranger safety videos for kids that's later dug up and edited with hilarious results.

I found the ending to be a particularly clever one. Lem's legacy as a martyr was hilarious. After being clubbed, imprisoned, scalped, and starved, the hapless boy's soul has something to feel good about and young boys have a role model. He is "The American Boy," the prime example of the vast opportunities for bodily harm American offers.

For this blog I wanted to explore the way that the author portrays the interaction between immigrants and America.  This interaction is played out in the scenes of Wu Fong’s whorehouse.  First there is the exploitation of the idea of America which we see through Wu Fong.  Then, there is the desire for the idea of America, the fantasy or dream, via the customers.  All parties literally rape defenseless America.

            Some historical background that I thought was interesting were the immigration laws of the time.  The Chinese exclusion act of 1882 was still in effect and would not be repealed until the 1940’s.  In 1910 the Dillingham report concludes that eastern and southern Europeans were officially inferior races.  1924 the official quota for immigrants became two percent of the existing nationalities already existing population in the US based on data from 1890.

            Already these few facts shed light on the political message behind the interactions of immigrants and America in the whorehouse.  Chinese were negatively stereotyped as we see Wu Fong here, to justify the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the United States.  A comment is made by the author that those of inferior races prefer white women.  These men of inferior races are later described to be for example Armenian.  This propagates the stereotype that southern European immigrants were inferior.

            When President Calvin Coolidge signed the 1924 immigration legislation, he said “America must be kept American”.   What I wonder is whether or not this is the author’s perspective as well.  It seems like it is but, there is such irony in that position that it seems unlikely.  Nathaniel West was himself the son of immigrants from Lithuania.  What’s more his real last name is Weinstein.  One can only wonder why he continually mocks the Jews having come from a Jewish background himself.  Further more, West was infamous for his love of prostitutes and his regular bouts of venereal disease. 

So why he is writing negatively about immigrants who frequent whorehouses escapes me.  The evidence seems to support that this indeed a political commentary.  Immigrants come to America seeking their fortune and end up taking away the money and jobs from Americans.  They also feed immorality, as the setting of a whorehouse indicates.  Interestingly none of the characters in the novel attack the immigrants or voice complaints against them.  Wu Fong seems to hold, surprisingly, a position of great power.

As I was reading A Cool Million I began thinking about the topic for my next blog post. Then it hit me: Candide! A Cool Million is EXACTLY like Voltaire’s Candide! Delighted by my own brilliance (ok, I’m exaggerating here), I googled Candide A Cool Million to see if I was stating the obvious or if maybe I was the first to make the perfect connection. To my disappointment, the very first website that popped up was last year's Place Studies site with, yes, a comparison between Candide and A Cool Million. Even the Wikipedia article mentions it.Yeah. Real original.

So I won’t be writing about the many ways in which A Cool Million mimics Candide. I’ll instead focus on the modern day “philosophy” that a Voltaire or a West would want to disprove.

But if you’re a bit fuzzy on the details of Candide and how it might relate to A Cool Million, I’ll make a brief summary (also, if you’re interested in the book and have some time to waste on the internet, I posted the first section of Candide the musical below. It’s really amusing even if musicals make you want to puke sometimes.):

Candide is the bastard child of a Baron‘s sister. He lives with the noble family and falls in love with his cousin, Cunegonde (almost exactly like Betty except wealthy.) All the characters of Candide are taught by a philosopher named Pangloss who is an almost exact replica of Shagpole. They are taught to believe that they live in the best of all possible worlds, where only the best of all possible things can happen. War breaks out and a lot of people are disemboweled, Cunegonde is raped and made a sex slave repeatedly… Pangloss contracts syphilis… and on and on, The only thing that doesn’t change throughout the story is that the characters all still pathetically believe that they live in the best of all possible worlds. Even the racism in Cool Million is pretty comparable to Candide.

So while I was reading A Cool Million I couldn’t help but wonder what a modern philosopher’s take on the overly optimistic or rags-to-riches philosophy would be?

My first thought was that it would have to be something to do with science solving all problems. Maybe it would end up as more science fiction than anything else (Vonnegut anyone?) Or maybe it would make fun of the lack of evolution in humans and the continual evolution of technology? The overuse of antidepressants? ADD medication? Plastic surgery? That could be funny.

Or maybe a modern version would make fun of the everyone-is-as-special-as-a-snowflake-philosophy. It could feature masses of teenagers watching rapstars (are they even called rapstars? Did I just make that up?) and pregnant sixteen year olds between hour long advertisements on MTV. They would walk out of their house so that they could talk about it, with their friends. Who would all be dressed the same. And they would all respect each other as individuals with individual opinions, so they would make sure to always agree, all the time.

Or better yet, maybe our modern optimism isn’t optimism at all. Maybe the real satire is in how sarcastic and pessimistic we are even when our stomachs are full, our homes warm, and we live under a functioning democracy. 

A Cool Million by Nathanael West is a parody of the Horatio Alger myth of success. Horatio Alger famously depicted poor and struggling children who rose up from their modest beginnings to enjoy the comforts of middle class life. A Cool Million serves as an allegory that works contrary to Alger’s myths where through hard work and strong virtues the main character is able to fall from poverty into a worse situation.
 
Lemuel Pitkin dreams of getting his cool million but is instead murdered and his image is exploited after his death.  According to the ex-president Nathan "Shagpoke" Whipple, anyone who aspires can become the next Rockefeller, Ford or simply the next millionaire; America “takes care of the honest and industrious and never fails them as long as they are both" (150).  Pitkin devises a plan to become the next millionaire; "He would [need to] earn ninety-six dollars for an eight-hour day or five hundred and seventy-six dollars for a six-day week. If he could keep it up, he would have a million dollars in no time" (165). However, Pitkin is never able to make his cool million. Instead, he is played, robbed, unfairly imprisoned, beaten, murdered and exploited. When Pitkin dies, he became a martyr for the Fascist National Revolutionary party. He is turned into the symbol for the Fascist National Revolutionary party, who want to “restore the lore and legendry of the plain American people and ridding our fair land of sophistication, Marxism, international capitalism and other sinister alien forces and elements.” Thus, the Fascist National Revolutionary party is the antithesis of the America Dream, or the Horatio Alger myth of success or what Pitkin desired for himself in America. The Fascist National Revolutionary party ignores Pitkin’s desire to live the American Dream and myth and instead uses his story as the basis of a national holiday where they sing the new national anthem, titled the “Lemuel Pitkin Song.” Thus, by following his aspiration and doing the supposed right thing, Pitkin becomes a symbol of the failures of the American Dream.
 
The Horatio Alger myth is the retelling of the American Dream that describes how an American child can rise to greatness through hard work. However, Nathanael West believes that the normal, honest American child will probably never achieve greatness. According to West, the attributes that will lead to greatness are “Cunning, craft, power, fraud, and aggression.” Therefore, the Horatio Alger myth of success has a higher probability of leading to failure and death rather than great wealth and happiness. 

Of anything we’ve read in class, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million is undoubtedly the funniest.  I continually found myself laughing aloud, and I really appreciated the change of pace from the certainly bleaker accounts we’ve been examining.  I felt a little bad laughing at a story of man who stumbled into so many misfortunes, but West’s novella exposes the ridiculousness of the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality through Lem’s determined optimism in a way that pity-invoking tales cannot do.  Instead of focusing on the negative effects of the capitalist system in Depression-era America, West mocks the entire system of ideologies.
 
In terms of travel and place, I found the role of New York City in Lem Pitkin’s “dismantling” particularly fascinating—maybe because we live here or perhaps due to the city’s continuing ability to stand as a beacon of the American dream.  When Lem first leaves his mother to make his “cool million” with only thirty dollars in his pocket, it is to New York he heads immediately.  New York epitomizes American opportunity and success (before the mid-twentieth-century suburban ideal).  It is a place, that based on its sheer size and infrastructure can purportedly give anyone an equal shot at making it big--gives everyone the “right to sell their labor and their children’s labor without restrictions as to either price or hours (110),” in the words of West.  For Lem though, who only first makes it to the city after a brief stint in jail, New York is not only an opportunity for success, but also for despair.  New York becomes a trap for the downtrodden to be knocked down even further—while pushing the wealthier up, of course.
 
New York is a land of specifically capitalist opportunity, a machine of sorts that will even turn on its strongest believers.  It is appropriate then that the surprisingly still optimistic Lem will return to New York after his journey across America, with a glass eye, wooden leg, and scalped head, only to be killed by a shot in the head.  Lem’s journey loops him back to New York, the ruthless lover who refuses to give anyone a break.
 
By the Sixties, this idealized image of New York—and the American city generally—will no longer exist, destroyed by the outflux of the middle class to the suburbs, and in 1975, Pres. Ford will essentially declare the then bankrupt city dead.  It seems that West’s mock-heroic tale of “the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin” is especially resonant with us today, after interest in the city began to regenerate in a post-Robert Moses world.  Although the American capitalist dream  has persisted with and without New York, it is an urban optimism that West’s story embodies and which seems to make its content particularly poignant with (and perhaps terrifying to) city-dwellers.  How much of our own desire to be here is based on that same fated, senseless optimism?

Nathanael West’s A Cool Million was by far one of the most enticing readings I have had to do for a class probably in the entire time of my time at NYU. There are so many incredible writers out there that take the work of writers before them and pay homage. They copy them, they recreate them, but how many actually satirize them? West does an incredible job of highlighting the American dream, the American writer, the American struggle, in a way that makes the reader smile and cringle simultaneously.
 
West was able to, in a relatively short story, touch on politics, race relations, economics, the role of art in society, the love story, etc. There were so many quotes I read aloud to others in the room (at their behest) . The irony of Lem having an honest face, and then ruined by toothless-ness, an eyeball disaster – it is so witty. The way every event in the story lines up the next and then circles back around for that perfect amount of irony – it is West commenting, so intelligently on the formulaic approach of storytellers with an agenda.
 
And what does it all mean? Lem dies in the end, a hero, but still dead. Betty, the ever-violated heroine ends up just fine as West would suggest. He highlights the unfortunate nature of beauty in her respect. He brings characters back into the story so that they recur so many times, the average scholar would be searching endlessly for reason or motive or meaning. The coincidence of character is so glaringly deliberate. West creates, or documents chaos, but what does it mean for the audience member?
 
Does he write A Cool Million as a cautionary tale against the American Dream, the hope of an unattainable fortune, whether spiritual or material? Or is A Cool Million the attempt to harness the chaos that is real life and inspire the reader to go beyond the romantic ideas of The American Dream and make it as best they can?
 
Or is A Cool Million just for entertainment, is it the burlesque equivalent to literature – a satire intended to make us laugh at ourselves, while simultaneously recognizing our unfortunate condition of being human?
 
West touches upon every single cliché about American life as it stretches through time - the women in Wu Fong’s “Laundromat”, the race mobs, even the pickpockets represent “quintessential America” at its very worst.
 
Lem just cannot catch a break, yet he strikes the perfect balance of being an active hero and a complete victim to the world. His numerous incarcerations become almost playful!
 
It seems counter-productive to analyze West’s work to death, as if that is the very response he wants – and wants to make fun of. It is a story to be read in jest, and to be taken seriously as it clearly defines the American expectations of its fellow man and citizen. West makes us question what it is we are fighting for, and if we are really fighting. 

A Cool Million by Nathanial West is grotesque, bazaar, and so abstracted from reality that it is hardly believable. It is a strange novel, overblown in its satire to such an extent that it becomes a satire of itself.  Yet, in a way, it is still compelling. Not because it is in anyway wholly believable, nor because it suggests any concrete call for social action, but simply because it constitutes a full on challenge to the American ideal.
Opening with the threat of eviction, the novel places “our hero,” a seventeen year old school boy in a trying predicament, he must either go out and “make his fortune” or face the reality of him and his mother’s eviction from their home.  From the onset, the novel is ridiculous, with the boy trying to obtain a new mortgage form the local bank which is owned and operated by the apparently deranged former President of the United States.  However, despite the novels ludicrous nature, it is nonetheless a strangely enjoyable read. The simplicity and offhandedness of the novels language provides a humorously objective tone to ridiculous circumstances.  As our hero progresses down his path to fortune, which as is obvious from the onset never arrives, he seems to undergo every imaginable hardship, from losing his leg and scalp to having his romantic interest raped by a bully and later sold into prostitution.
Despite his many hardships however, Lem never loses hope and holds onto his naïve optimism throughout the entirety of the novel. Although Lem’s naivety gets him into trouble at virtually every stage in the novel, it also acts as a protective barrier which shields him from ever having to come to terms with the true hopelessness of his predicament. All of this works to make Lem a truly sympathetic and endearing character. At every turn he is beaten down, both laterally as well as figuratively, by the society in which he so desperately longs to succeed.
Although the novel as a whole is absurdist, it still maintains a certain relatability, in that although few of us have been beaten down to the extent that Lem is in the novel, we all have in one way or another been rejected by society at some point in our lives.  This I believe is the compelling factor of the novel, that despite its absurdity and unappealing, albeit humorous conclusion, it nonetheless still provides a sympathetic character and an outlet for the frustration we all experience at one point or another in our own lives.                    

In Nathanial West’s A Cool Million we see themes of the American dream parodied, much like optimism and society was parodied in Voltaire’s Candide in the age of the Enlightenment. I found this a really enjoyable and quickly paced read. “Mr. West's hilarious parody-satire is a good deal of fun. You will read it at a sitting and enjoy it. But like Candide it strikes a good many notes that sound a little too close to truth to make you altogether comfortable. And there is a good deal of that typically American humor of the comic strip and the vaudeville act—here part of the satire—which depends upon the spectacle of physical pain for its guffaws” (source).
 
I found that the themes of disillusionment and what the intellectual and artistic community did with this sentiment during the 1930s was explored extremely well here. Reading this novel after reading travel novels and somewhat documentarian style works this semester was truly refreshing. What this book does that the others, with their realism and attempts at appearing truly authentic, was get at the true feelings behind the discontentment in America, and the absurdity of American optimism. This relates very well to my post from last week about Woody Guthrie’s sentiments on the absurdity of certain American optimisms and propaganda (ie: the national anthem). His song “This Land Is Your Land,” is a commentary much like the novel A Cool Million. It is both critical of the systems of the time and full of social commentary.
 
The irony of both Guthrie’s song, and West’s novel is that the end message pokes fun at the American dream, as much as they both wished the American dream was possible. “For Lemuel Pitkin, although he never gets his cool million and is finally murdered, becomes the hero of the American Leather Shirts, the nation's martyr…bent on restoring the lore and legendry of the plain American people and ridding our fair land of sophistication, Marxism, …American “Know Nothingism” in modern form comes into its own. And the “Lemuel Pitkin Song” is the new national anthem” (source).
 
The author himself died young and in relative obscurity dispite the success of his other novels. “As disillusioned and frustrated as [West was]…West wanted desperately to believe in love, the American Dream…but life kept getting in his way" (source). West made it quite clear through this novel, that the “American Dream,’ was all but a propagandistic joke at the time: idealism at its very best…“in West's view of things, the average, honest American Boy is likely to achieve very little” (source).