A Cool Million, or, The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin and The Dream Life of Balso Snell

A Cool Million is West's third novel It is a brutal farce of Horatio Alger's novels and their eternal optimism. A Cool Million, as its subtitle suggests, presents âthe dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin,â piece by piece. As a satire of the Horatio Alger myth of success, the novel is evocative of Voltaireâs Candide, which satirized the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope. Pitkin is a typical âSchlemielâ, 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. Pitkinâs troubles, however, don't end with his death. Even after his passing he is exploited as a martyr by the âNational Revolutionary partyâ, 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 âsophistication, Marxism and International Capitalism.â  The novel ends with a series of roaring "hails" from the crowd. Literary significance & criticism Pitkin's pathetic inability to conform to societyâs standards, or to the âAmericanâ way of life, is the main cause of his repeated failures. Nevertheless, there is something admirable in Pitkinâs 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 couldnât touch the dream. West not only parodies Alger by mimicking his prose style, he also lifted several passages directly from a number of different Alger novels. The problem that arises from these passages lacking an ironic wink is of uncertainty. In A Cool Million, West presents Italian slavers, 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? The Dream Life of Balso Snell presents a young man's immature and cynical search for meaning in a series of dreamlike encounters inside the entrails of the Trojan Horse. Plot summary Balso, the protagonist, comes across the Trojan Horse in the tall grass around Troy and promptly seeks a way to get in: âthe mouth was beyond his reach, the navel provided a cul-de-sac, and so, forgetting his dignity, he approached the last. O Anus Mirabilis!â The literary critic Leslie Fiedler reads much into this and sees the whole novel as âa fractured and dissolving parable of the very process by which the emancipated Jew enters into the world of Western Culture.â Inside the Trojan Horse Balso encounters an array of odd characters whom, he realizes, are all âwriters in search of an audienceâ. These characters also represent various religious and artistic ideals. Balso hears their stories systematically, only to discard them one by one, in a strictly nihilist fashion. Literary significance and criticism The lack of a coherent plot structure, the juvenile humor and the abundant scatological details are all intended to aggravate, perplex and annoy readers. The desired result, according to West, is a book that is âa protest against writing booksâ. The juvenileness and incoherence of the novel prompt critics to disregard it as merely âa sneer in the bathroom mirror at Artâ. source: Wikipedia

Author / Editor: West, Nathanael

Category: Humor

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