West, Nathanael

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Hollywood Depicted as It was In 1939 [73][26]
The literary equivalent of a David Lynch movie.
Don't waste your time
Hollywood, an insider's perspective.
Locusts Then, Locusts Now

The Day of the Locust (Signet Classic)
Nathanael West
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Customer Reviews:

Hollywood Depicted as It was In 1939 [73][26].......2007-05-06

Interestingly, without any intention, I read this novel immediately after finishing Joan Didion's "Play It As It Lays." Each is a burning indictment of Hollywood - this novel was written in 1939 and "Play" was written in 1970.

Like Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49", the style of this novel is quirky and many of the moments are meant to shock the reader. Some shocks (remember this is a 1939 novel) include a screening of a french pornographic film at one person's house of prostitution, a detailed description of a cock fight at Homer Simpson's (yes that is the character's name) garage, a beautiful actress's (Faye Greener) decision to pay for her father's funeral by employing herself with a silent screen actor's cat house, an incredible depiction of running through a studio's lot where one backdrop falls into another - distanced by centuries and continents from the prior, and an angry dwarf's (Abe Kusich) confrontation with about anyone he meets.

The ending reads heavily. Is it metaphor? Is it purely emblematic? In any event, it is riotous, where the dying mental characters of the novel congregate like frantic sheep and hurt one another in a crowded attempt to "get one glance" at a movie star at the famous movie house where many films are opened - Kahn's Persian Palace Theatre.

The book scoffs Hollywood's allure and sensual delight envisioned by the midwesterners (Homer is from Des Moines, Iowa) and others."Once there, they discover that sunshine isn't enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don't know what to do with their time. They haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. . . They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn't any ocean where most of them come from, but after you've seen one wave, you've seen them all."

The protagonist, Tod Hackett, cannot escape the ennui - the malaise - with which he lives. Like Walter Percy's "The Moviegoer", the character's life remains in a funk. Unlike Percy's character, Hackett does not escape the ennui, and becomes one of "them." Those whose ". . . boredom becomes more and more terrible. . . They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing." Life (for all of the characters in this book) is miserable under the golden sun of Hollywood.

This is depressing - but not like Didion's "Play." West does not reach into the mind of the protagonist. Instead, West shows us how unique and simultaneously droll Tod's life can be. One can only wonder if this novel is autobiographical.

The literary equivalent of a David Lynch movie........2007-02-19

Nathaniel West's sardonic and dark novel of Hollywood ousiders is as warm and friendly as a dead codfish. A group of oddballs, all living in Hollywood all seem to be slipping towards destruction in this classic of the genre. A studio artist, an aspiring actress and old vaudevillian and others collide with each other in a quest for something intangible, and make glancing blows of emotion during their journey. It's interesting to me that West's novel, though full of tragedy in some sense, is not without humor, and the characters, though gritty, are slightly unreal. It feels to me almost like West has created a sick cartoon of a novel, which is absorbing and full of interesting visual touches, but never quite meant to be taken seriously. It is, however, riveting!

Don't waste your time.......2007-01-08

This is a depressing book. There is nothing in it but busted dreams, unfulfilled lust, misery and sadness. Don't waste your time reading it. Just listen to the song, "Maneater", by Nelly Furtado and you will have the gist of the story!!

Hollywood, an insider's perspective........2006-12-24

What "The Day of the Locust" lacks in plot, it more than makes up for in character development. This short but powerful novel is about the Hollywood of the 1930s. It's a third person narrative that describes it's subject matter, largely though not exclusively, from the point of view of Tod Hackett, a fledgling set and costume designer newly arrived from the east.

As author Nathanael West tells it, Hollywood and California in general is not so much a place as it is a destination. A destination not only for those seeking fame and fortune in movies, but for those yearning to restore their physical, mental and spiritual health. Personifying the latter group is a repressed Iowan with the improbable name of Homer Simpson. Tod becomes acquainted with Homer because of their mutual infatuation with a beautiful but vapid would be starlet named Faye Greener.

"The Day of the Locust" is a skillfully written novel notable for its fascinating cast of characters and its vividly descriptive prose. Written nearly 70 years ago, it has weathered the test of time and passed with flying colors.

Locusts Then, Locusts Now.......2006-12-06

If there is one test that tries all equally, it is the test of time. What is merely a statement of a fad, or a passing whim, quickly fades away. What lasts, thick and thin, good times and bad, passing through fashion and invention and change, proves itself worthy. So has Nathanael West's short novel, "The Day of the Locust," passed its test of time. Written in and about the 1930s, it is a portrait of the most superficial of places: Hollywood. And, aside from progress in computerized special effects and the ever quickening turnaround of superstar marriages and divorces, what has changed about this town and its culture? Ah, nothing. The superficial reigns.

West calls to stage a most colorful array of, some might say, "freaks." But perhaps that is too harsh. These are misfits and fantasizers and wildly hopefuls. There is the actress part-timing as a prostitute, the cowboy without a ranch, the drunken dwarf, the lonely and geekish hotel bookkeeper in stupid devotion to the actress who never quite knows what to do with his immense hands, the screenwriter with a rubber horse in his swimming pool, the obnoxious and precocious child star, and a string of other unusuals that, in Hollywood, are all too usual. Their backdrops and scenarios are no less so: cockfights and porn flick screenings, questionable deaths, business schemes based on anatomy overthinking brain. It's all here. And West handles it all like a fine juggling act, never dropping the ball.

His grand finale is indeed grand. It is what brings to mind the locust. This seething insect that acts en masse and without thinking, following just to follow, stampeding and destroying all in its ravenous path, yet not without eruptions of the grotesque.

Perhaps what makes this all so moving is that Hollywood brings to spotlight what, after all, exists everywhere. Only here it is the stuff of which movies are made. Or, in this case, a masterly piece of fine literature.

Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust

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Reader beware
"Every Man His Own Carver"
Only because it was assigned
The Torture Of Conciousness
Surreal and Scathing

Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

"Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,' " observed Nathanael West the year before his untimely death in 1940. "My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I'm lucky to be published." Yet today, West is widely recognized as a prophetic writer whose dark and comic vision of
a society obsessed with mass-
produced fantasies foretold much
of what was to come in American life.
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), which West envisioned as "a novel in the form of a comic strip," tells of an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist who becomes tragically embroiled in the desperate lives of his readers. The Day of the Locust (1939) is West's great dystopian Hollywood novel based on his experiences at the seedy fringes of the movie industry.
"The work of Nathanael West, savagely, comically, tragically original, has come into its own," said novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg. "A new public [has] discovered in the writings of West a brilliant reflection of its own sense of chaos and helplessness in a world running more to madness than to reason."

Customer Reviews:

Reader beware.......2007-05-17

Wow. Much like Paul Bowles, this author takes no prisoners. May I suggest that you be in a stable frame of mind before reading this novel, lest it prove to be one unsettling factor too many for you. I found myself to be none too comfortable to be counted as a member of the human race at the end of this book. Written at about the same time as Raymond Chandler's early novels and set in the same real estate, The Day of the Locust is about five times as sordid. It is totally original and totally unpredictable, except for the scent of doom that pervades it from the opening page. You know that the author was writing about what he saw. Los Angeles and Hollywood were rotten seventy years ago. What must they be like now? West covers so much ground, with such economy, and it's all so readable. This devastating work is a remarkable achievement. What a staggering loss that Nathanael West died so young. And what a surprise to find Homer Simpson hiding out in such a fine novel. Highly recommended.

"Every Man His Own Carver".......2006-12-30

In both of these stunning novellas - one set in New York, the other in Los Angeles - Nathanael West shows us a world without a center, one in which the various characters are therefore free to pursue their own idiosyncratic notions of bliss. Conspicuously absent is any widely accepted code of manners which might have a tonic influence in shaping character and aspiration, or even at lowest ebb in keeping people more recognizably human than grotesque. Thus the considerable element of the distorted which figures strongly in each of these pieces. Shrike in "Miss Lonelyhearts" and Faye Greener in "Day of the Locust" are each self-absorbed to a freakish degree, though West's point in such satiric but painful drawing is to bring contemporary readers to see the frighteningly normal in such freakishness, the unacknowledged bizarreness in modern everyday behavior.

Only because it was assigned.......2006-10-17

I wish there was a rating under one star. I'm supposed to read this for a class, but, in rare fashion, I doubt that I will finish the novel. I realize this is supposed to be surreal, but must I sacrifice plot and character to immerse myself in "literature"?
Maybe I'm a product of the times, but a plot which is at least interesting would be nice, even if I don't care about the characters. Please: Barth, Barthleme, and Pynchon write complex, surrealistic fiction, but also give us characters we can care about and plots which fascinate.

The Torture Of Conciousness.......2005-11-18

Nathanael West was well practiced in the arts of revelation and cruelty that go way beyond what we normally think of as satire. "Miss Lonelyhearts" alone is a dark and disturbing jewel in his very strange crown. It bites the reader softly and injects a moral venom into the reader giving her over to experiences of psychological subtley and derangement that make ordinary psychological novels seem pedestrian - excercises in mere cataloguing. "Miss Lonelyhearts" is a visionary experience.

I wonder if Thomas Harris, the author of "Silence of the Lambs" got any of his inspiration for Hannibal Lector from the character of Shrike. Shrike is very bad. He is a sort of demonic being who cares enough about his victims to give them the very best in a form of torture that interrogates their souls and illuminates every last particle of illusion he finds in them. He doesn't eat their livers with fauva beans and a nice chiante because he doesn't need to. Showing them the nature of their souls in the hellish light of his inquiry is more than enough nourishment for him.
He is happy. He finds it no sin to labor in his vocation.
Miss Lonelyhearts himself is an abusive Christ figure who dies for no one's sins other than his own. He is a directionless victim full of lust and a malice disguised as compassion. He was born for ruin and his death is the exact opposite of anything we would ever call an apotheosis. No one's sins are redeemed. They are confirmed.

Nathanael West apparently was a self-hating jew but his moral rigor is so savage and extreme methinks he might be best thought of as a literary satanist come to torment and educate us all through demonic revelries that move in slow motion. I can't remember if there are very many colors described in this little poisonous novel because the whole effect on my inner eye is a dark wastescape composed of tones in black, false-white, and endlessly arranged shades of gray.

Surely "Miss Lonelyhearts" was one of the best novels of the twentieth century but hardly anybody has heard of it. I recommend it strongly to those who prefer their humor as black as the pit of hell, but hidden behind a sunlight that tortures the ground until spikes of grass grow up.

Surreal and Scathing.......2005-10-21

West always reminds me of Fitzy. Extremely cynical views on love and the America dream.

Nathanael West : Novels and Other Writings : The Dream Life of Balso Snell / Miss Lonelyhearts / A Cool Million / The Day of the Locust / Letters (Library of America)

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The man who burned Los Angeles
Artless?
Is LOA Running Out of Good American Authors?
Of Greater Academic than Casual Interest
hard work by Harvard grad students

Nathanael West : Novels and Other Writings : The Dream Life of Balso Snell / Miss Lonelyhearts / A Cool Million / The Day of the Locust / Letters (Library of America)
Nathanael West
Manufacturer: Library of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1883011280

Amazon.com

In 1940, when an automobile accident prematurely claimed Nathanael West's life, he was a relatively obscure writer, the author of only four short novels. West's reputation has grown considerably since then and he is now considered one of the 20th century's major authors. This superb volume, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, compiles all of West's novels and a great number of other documents, including stories, plays, and letters. Novels and Other Writings is the most complete West now available in a single volume. Film buffs will be particularly fascinated by Miss Lonelyhearts, which served as the basis for two intriguing movies and The Day of the Locust, West's final novel, which many consider to be the most withering attack on Hollywood ever written. Among the papers included in this collection are a never-filmed screenplay, Before the Fact, and a screen treatment of West's novel A Cool Million.

Customer Reviews:

The man who burned Los Angeles.......2005-04-30

The quartet of piquant short novels Nathanael West had published by the time he died in a car accident at the age of thirty-seven occupy a unique niche in American literature. A Hollywood screenwriter who migrated from studio to studio in search of sustenance, West was a humorist with a warped conscience, a young man who had fraudulently gained admission to Brown University and probably belonged there anyway, an intellectual misfit trying to make a living and a name for himself in a glitzy industry. Like Kafka with a comic-strip aesthetic, West saw the world and the people around him as the tortured products of an insane creator, cartoons to be stretched, punched, and mutilated.

"Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous," West observes in "The Day of the Locust," the last of his novels, which made an indelible impression upon me when I first read it a few years ago. Ironically, sadness is definitely not the note he strikes in his portrayal of a congregation of hilarious cretins who populate the fringes of 1930s Hollywood; it is a very brash and "loud" novel, but incredibly it is more refined and less outrageous than its three predecessors. The surrealistic narrative of "The Dream Life of Balso Snell," by contrast, is not to be read with a queasy stomach. The unassuming Mr. Snell happens upon a giant wooden horse--apparently the same the ancient Greeks used to infiltrate Troy--and, entering through the posterior, finds the intestines inhabited by unhinged writers in search of an audience.

In "Miss Lonelyhearts," the title character (who is a man) is an advice columnist for a newspaper, unable to muster anything better than empty platitudes in response to tearful letters from barely literate and improbably pathetic losers who are mostly beyond help. He is not, however, doing this just as a hoax; he approaches his role soberly because the trust his correspondents place in him forces him to "examine the values by which he lives." If "Miss Lonelyhearts" seems farcical, consider how accurately it prophesies the Jerry Springer era of televised dirty laundry and voluntary public embarrassment.

"A Cool Million" is a relentlessly cruel Horatio Alger parody that follows the misadventures of Lemuel Pitkin, a Vermont boy who goes to New York to try to make a fortune in order to save his mother's house from foreclosure but is foiled continually as he encounters an endless procession of human sleaze: corrupt businessmen, brutish cops, brothel operators and their clientele, rapists, thieves, and con men. (The screen story West wrote for "A Cool Million"--a project never filmed--is understandably so much cleaner and more optimistic that it hardly resembles the original novel.)

The four novels combined constitute only half of the Library of America volume, the rest of which includes miscellaneous fragments, plays, and letters. Among the detritus are the unsuccessful play "Good Hunting," a relatively conventional satire of war and war correspondence, an unfilmed screenplay based on Francis Iles's novel "Before the Fact" (a different screenplay by another author was used by the studio instead, and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as "Suspicion"), and a college essay praising Euripides to the stars. This juxtaposition effectively illuminates the two dichotomous worlds of West--the true artist and the commercial hack, the grotesque emerging from the mundane.

Artless?.......2003-05-28

It's beyond me how anyone could describe the prose of Lonelyhearts and Locust as "artless" (as one reviewer did). I can understand how some might find the bitterness and despair of these two works not to their liking. But artless? Years after reading these two novels, I can recall entire passages by heart and picture the scenes vividly. Such effects are not achieved by artless amateur writers, only by those with considerable literary talent.

That said, I must agree with the other reviewers here: The remaining stuff collected by LOA is distinctly second-rate, the product of West on a bad day or before he reached his stride. Only if you are a scholar researching twentieth-century American novelists should you buy this volume. Get the inexpensive paperback book published by New Directions, containing the two imperishable works Lonelyhearts and Locust.

Is LOA Running Out of Good American Authors?.......2002-10-18

As a long-standing and avid reader of the fiction volumes produced by the Library of America, I eagerly awaited this book and now I can't understand why they printed it. I stopped reading after about 400 pages and haven't been able to garner the energy and patience for more. 'Miss Lonelyhearts' was slightly interesting, but a very slight novel written in an artless manner. As for the rest of what I read, I consider it time not at all well spent. Dreiser, another author featured by the Library of America, created artless prose also...but he did so in the context of engaging stories that offered intellectual stimulation. I'll give this book away rather than have it consume valuable shelf space.

Of Greater Academic than Casual Interest.......2002-06-15

Little known during his lifetime, Nathanael West is today considered one of the 20th Century's most influential authors, a writer whose pitch-black satires focus on the emptiness of an American society choking on its own regurgitated mythology. His reputation rests squarely upon two works: MISS LONELYHEARTS, the tale of a newspaper advice columnist who is overwhelmed by the tragedies of those who write to him for advice, and THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, a savage vision of American society turning upon the illusions fosted upon them by a Hollywood mentality.

Both MISS LONELYHEARTS and LOCUST are powerful works, every bit as vital and unnerving today as when they were first published in the 1930s; I recommend both very strongly. But the remainder of West's cannon is extremely problematic. Like the little girl with the curl, when West was good he was very, very good, and when he was bad he was horrid. And with its inclusion of his lesser writings, this Library of America anthology gives us a detailed tour of the latter.

THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL, West's first novel, was an experimental tale that parodies intellectual pretentions through religious, mythological, and aesthetic motifs--but while it has a number of fascinating ideas and conceits, it is at best an interesting failure. A COOL MILLION, West's third novel, is a satire on the Horatio Alger myth; it is considerably more readable than SNELL, but it lags far behind both LONELYHEARTS and LOCUST.

The rest of the anthology consists of a failed Broadway play, an unfilmed screenplay, unpublished stories and fragments, juvenalia, and personal letters. Both the play and screenplay--GOOD HUNTING and BEFORE THE FACT respectively--are written very much against the grain; it is not difficult to see why the play failed and director Hitchcock (who filmed BEFORE THE FACT as SUSPICION) ordered a completely new script. The remaining items are mediocre at best, dire at worst, and although West's letters are interesting from a historical standpoint they have no literary merit per se.

West's life was cut short by an automobile accident just as he seemed to be finding his true voice, and it is interesting to speculate on how his writing might have developed if he had lived to write more. This is an important collection--but it's importance is largely of an academic nature rather than a literary one, of more interest to the serious student of American literature than to a casual reader. If you fall into the latter catagory, I strongly recommend that you read MISS LONELYHEARTS and DAY OF THE LOCUST (both of which are available in inexpensive editions) rather than purchase this particular volume--and only after, if you like so many others among us find yourself fascinated by West's work, contemplate purchase of this anthology.

hard work by Harvard grad students.......2000-04-30

Thanks to the efforts of a bunch of Harvard grad students, this is the only book you need to become a cocktail party expert on Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein, 1903; died in Hollywood in 1940). My favorite part of the book is the capsule biography in the back. He drops out of high school (like me!) and alters his transcript to get into Tufts. He flunks out of Tufts but gets hold of a transcript for another Nathan Weinstein, who was apparently a pretty good student. He uses this to get into Brown and becomes an Ivy League graduate in 1924.

Oh yes, the writing... West's prose could easily pass for a New Yorker story circa 1985. Furthermore, his characters behave a lot like our contemporaries. None of this struck me as remarkable but I think it accounts for why he was so widely admired by good writers of his day and so roundly ignored by readers during the 1930s (perhaps 6,000 copies of his books were sold during his lifetime). Even if his writing style hadn't been so modern, releasing the bleak Miss Lonelyhearts in 1933 cannot have been an inspired marketing idea (the publisher went bankrupt just as the book was released).

If you want to read just one West novel, my personal choice would be Day of the Locust (1939), his last work. It is about the people destroyed by their dreams of California and Hollywood, seen through the eyes of a journeyman studio artist. He's obsessed with an aspiring actress, Faye Greener: "Her invitation wasn't to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn't expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn't even have time to sweat or close your eyes."

The strangest novel in the collection is A Cool Million, wherein a Candide-like young man, Lemuel Pitkin, goes out to make his fortune in what a variety of Panglosses keep telling him is the Land of Opportunity. As in a Horatio Alger story, Pitkin meets a lot of rich and powerful men who are in a position to help him. West departs from Alger in that Pitkin is cheated and mutilated by all of his encounters with the rest of humanity.

A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell: Two Novels
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"A Cool Million" is The Great American Political Satire

A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell: Two Novels
Nathanael West
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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20th Century | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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West, Nathanael | ( W ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0374530270
Release Date: 2006-06-27

Book Description

Nathanael West was only thirty-seven when he died in 1940, but his depictions of the sometimes comic, sometimes horrifying aspects of the American scene rival those of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. A Cool Million, written in 1934, is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the midst of the Depression. The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) was described by one critic as "a fantasy about some rather scatological adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan horse."

Customer Reviews:

"A Cool Million" is The Great American Political Satire.......2006-08-23

While "Balso Snell" is funny in a late-Mark Twain kind of way, the real reason to buy this book is "A Cool Million," the Great American Political Satire. Written in the 1930's (and if you know anything about the wacko American Right of that decade, you'll realize that West is not exaggerrating too much) "A Cool Million" still packs a satirical punch. This is probably because, unfortunately, the right-wing wackos West skewers have now taken over the American asylum...

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The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
Manufacturer: Time Incorporated
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000GQOW8O

A Cool Million & The Dream Life of Balso Snell: Two Novels

Average customer rating:

Interesting Failures
"A Cool Million": A Stomach Churning Satire
For the West completist only
"A Cool Million" is great!
a book sure to cheer up even the most bitter of hearts

A Cool Million & The Dream Life of Balso Snell: Two Novels
Nathanael West
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust
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Book Description

A Cool Million (1934) subtitled "The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin", is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the midst of the Depression and is written in a bracing, mock-heroic style that has lost none of its wit or power. The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), West's first work, was described by one delighted critic as "a fantasy about some rather scatalogical adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan Horse."

Customer Reviews:

Interesting Failures.......2002-06-17

Although he was little known during his short lifetime, Nathanael West's MISS LONELYHEARTS and THE DAY OF THE LOCUST are two of the most influential works of 20th Century American Literature. They are the best of West's work, and I recommend them very highly. But West's work was extremely hit or miss, and this edition of his two lesser novels demonstrate that fact in abundance.

THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL is West's first novel, a surrealistic fantasy about a man who stumbles upon the Trojan Horse, climbs into the rectum, and meanders through the horse's lower intestines. Along the way he meets an aesthetically argumentative guide, a biographer who is writing a biography of a biographer, a mystic who is attempting to crucify himself with thumbtacks, and sundry others. There is an abundance of ideas here, some of them quite amusing and entertaining, but ultimately this parody of bad-taste pseudo-intellectualism becomes as bad-taste pseudo-intellectual as its subjects.

Written between MISS LONELYHEARTS and LOCUST, A COOL MILLION satirizes the American dream via an extended parody of the Horatio Alger myth, and presents us with the story of a young man who goes out into the world to seek his fortune--and begins his adventures with his lady love sold into white slavery and he himself cast wrongfully into prison. This is an extremely bitter, often funny novel, and it is considerably more readable than BALSO SNELL, but its dryness quickly becomes tedious and the work lags far, far behind either MISS LONELYHEARTS or LOCUST.

These novels are interesting failures at best, and while West fans will enjoy seeing how the writer developed but both THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL and A COOL MILLION have more academic interest than anything else. Recommended for hardcore fans, but all others should pass them by.

"A Cool Million": A Stomach Churning Satire.......2001-11-10

Former President of the United States Nathan "Shagpoke" Whipple, now C.E.O. of the Rat River National Bank of the town of Ottsville, Vermont, tells young Lemuel Pitkin, "The story of (John D.) Rockefeller and of (Henry) Ford is the story of every great American...Like them, you were born poor and on a farm. Like them, by honesty and industry, you cannot fail to succeed."

With this advice in hand thus begins Lem's journey to secure his fortune and to prevent the foreclosure on his mother's house. The only collateral Lem can put up for the tiny loan he obtains from Whipple's bank is the family cow. After all, according to the ex-President, you must have some money in order to make money.

"A Cool Million" is Nathanael West's mordantly witty and deeply bitter satire of a decent, but profoundly naive young man's attempts to achieve the American Dream during the darkest days of the Great Depression. West effectively lampoons the false promise of the old maxim that hard work and diligence equals success in America. For all his determination, Lem suffers one horrible indignity after another and is ripped to shreds in the process. A pawn in a facist plot to take over New York City, his final achievement is an unintended martyrdom.

The only thing that prevents me from giving this small gem a 5 star review is the constant feeling of dread that I felt in the pit of my stomach while reading this extraordinarily disturbing novella.

For the West completist only.......2001-01-03

[NOTE: This review refers only to A Cool Million.]

Nathanael West, A Cool Million (Berkeley, 1934)

Despite having published less than six hundred pages of material in his short and rather unhappy life, Nathanael West is revered in critical circles for two groundbreaking American novels, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. West published three other novels during his lifetime, and while Lonelyhearts and Locust are constantly in print, the others-- The Dream Life of Balso Snell, A Cool Million, and Good Hunting-- are considerably harder to get hold of. (There is a hardcover edition of four of the novels, excluding Good Hunting, in print from the library of America.) Reading A Cool Million, it's not hard to see why it might not be as popular as his two better-known works.

A Cool Million is a vicious satire of the Horatio Alger stereotypes popular during the Depression, the endless stories of how anyone with enough gumption could succeed in America. West takes an Alger-like hero, Lemuel Pitkin, and sends him on his way to the big city to make his fortune (actually, he's after $1500, but we'll put that aside). By the time he reaches the big city, he's been robbed and arrested. And things only get worse from there. The supporting cast contains not a single likable character (by design) save Pitkin, who's more pathetic than likable, and his childhood sweetheart, whom we first meet as she's being abducted by white slavers to work in a Chinese brothel. Everyone's out for something, and most of them seem to wact to extract it from poor Pitkin.

It is satire that, by turns, treads the edge and hops over it into that fuzzy area where one can't be sure whether West is still being satirical, or whether he's letting a nasty streak of his own show. This far removed from the book's timeliness and publication date, only scholars can be sure, and thus the book doesn't hold up as well as it otherwise might. But if you're not a fan of the Horatio Alger mythology, this should be right up your alley. **

"A Cool Million" is great!.......1999-12-05

Having read all four of West's novels, I feel that "A Cool Million" is easily the greatest of his works. It presents a sarcastic and cynical view of life in America during the 1930's. The novel is, by the way, a modernization of "Candide," by Voltaire, and it is still fresh after sixty-five years. West is second only to Mark Twain in identifying and attacking society's corruption and vices. The book only gets four stars, however, because it also includes West's worst novel, "The Dream Life of Balso Snell," which is a complete waste of his talents. "Balso Snell" is completely disjointed and unorganized. The main character wanders around inside of a wooden horse and meets various allegorical losers. Now you do not have to read "Balso Snell", because I have just told you the entire story. That the author could produce two works which are such polar opposites in quality and readability is surprising. Buy this book for "Cool Million" - you will not regret it!

a book sure to cheer up even the most bitter of hearts.......1998-11-11

You know that intellectojerk that you went to school with, the 'tortured artist' kid? He wrote a book; and, boy, is it good! Read it to your kids while they're falling asleep.

The Complete Works of Nathanael West: The Dream Life of Balso Snell; Miss Lonelyhearts; A Cool Million; The Day of the Locust.

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The Complete Works of Nathanael West: The Dream Life of Balso Snell; Miss Lonelyhearts; A Cool Million; The Day of the Locust.
Nathanael. West
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, New York
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000LD75ZO

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Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
Manufacturer: New Directions Paperback
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000MPPFX0

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The Dream Life of Balso Snell
Nathanael West
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

In this 1931 Dada-inspired work, the first novel of the author of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, the eponymous anti-hero stumbles across the Trojan Horse and climbs inside. His journey takes him through a mental jungle, offering an unforgettable look at the dark side of the American dream.

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