A Cool Million

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Title A Cool Million

1961 reprint cover
Author	Nathanael West
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Parody, Farce
Publisher	Covici Friede
Released	June 19, 1934
Media type	Print (Paperback & Hardcover)
Pages	229 pp
ISBN	NA

A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin is Nathanael West's third novel, published in 1934. It is a brutal farce of Horatio Alger's novels and their eternal optimism.

Contents 1 Plot Summary 2 Literary significance & criticism 3 Publication History 4 Footnotes

[edit] Plot Summary

A Cool Million, as its subtitle suggests, presents “the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin,” piece by piece. As a satire of the Horatio Alger myth of success, the novel is evocative of Voltaire’s Candide, which satirized the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope. Pitkin is a typical ‘Schlemiel’, stumbling from one situation to the next; he gets robbed, cheated, unjustly arrested, frequently beaten and exploited. In a parallel plot Betty Prail, Pitkin's love interest, is raped, abused, and sold into prostitution. Over the course of the novel Pitkin manages to lose an eye, his teeth, his thumb, his scalp and his leg, but nevertheless retains his optimism and gullibility to the inevitably bitter end.

Pitkin’s troubles, however, don't end with his death. Even after his passing he is exploited as a martyr by the ‘National Revolutionary party’, a political organization led by Shagpoke Whipple, a manipulative former American president. Pitkin's birthday becomes a national holiday and American youths march down the streets singing songs in his honor. Whipple speaks out against aliens and calling for a rejection of “sophistication, Marxism and International Capitalism.” ^[1] The novel ends with a series of roaring "hails" from the crowd.

[edit] Literary significance & criticism

Pitkin's pathetic inability to conform to society’s standards, or to the ‘American’ way of life, is the main cause of his repeated failures. Nevertheless, there is something admirable in Pitkin’s naïve persistence, as West wrote in a letter to S. J. Perelman:

Suppose he had the Horatio Alger slant and was a guy who was trying to get one foot on the ladder of success and they were always moving the ladder on him, but they couldn’t touch the dream.^[2]

West, in providing a parody of Alger, has abandoned his style completely, utilizing a prose style that, at certain points, seems lifted almost intact from Alger novels. The problem that arises from this deliberate lack of an ironic wink is of uncertainty; at times West is so somber and monotonous in tone we might think that he is serious. In A Cool Million, West presents Italian kidnappers, Chinese pimps, brutal Irish cops, and greedy Jewish lawyers. The vicious stereotypes presented prompted critics to question: at what point does a joke about racism cease to be funny and remain merely racist?

Though most critics dismiss the novel as too direct of a parody to have any real literary merit, Harold Bloom includes A Cool Million in his list of canonical works of the period he names the Chaotic Age (1900-present)in The Western Canon ^[3]. Bloom also deems the rhetoric used by Shagpoke Whipple as prophetic of such presidents as Ronald Reagan ^[4].

[edit] Publication History

West began writing A Cool Million in the fall of 1933. A handwritten first draft was completed in November. Though Harcourt, Brace rejected the novel, West continued to work on it until it was finally accepted by Covici-Friede in March 1934 The novel was published in New York in an edition of 3,000 copies to mixed reviews and poor sales; it was not reprinted in West's lifetime. The novel later appeared in several reprints, following West's renewed fame, and was collected in a single volume edition of the complete novels, as well as in the Library of America edition of West's collected works.^[5]

[edit] Footnotes

1. ^ West, Nathanael. Novels & Other Writings. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. New York: The Library of America, 1997. 238.
2. ^ quoted in Martin, Jay. Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. New York: Hayden, 1971. xxi.
3. ^ Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1994. 532.
4. ^ Bloom, Harold. Introduction. American fiction, 1914-1945. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 22-23.
5. ^ West, Nathanael. Novels & Other Writings. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. New York: The Library of America, 1997. 814.