A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell: Two Novels
by Nathanael West
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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."Tags
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Overall, pretty disappointing if you are looking for something as interesting as Day of the Locust.
A Cool Million (* 1/2)
Naive Lemuel Pitkin heads out to the big city to earn enough money to keep the home he and his mother rent from being sold out from under them. Along the way, he is assisted (?) by a peculiar ex-President who draws him into a radical new political movement. The series of injuries Lemuel suffers become more and more extreme as he is taken advantage of by a series of con men or is blamed for something he didn't do. Clearly West intends this as a great, rollicking black satire of Depression-era America, with Communists and Jewish bankers as the cartoon villains. It just doesn't work, however. We may stand and marvel at show more the goings on a little bit, but there is nothing really here to see. And it isn't that you can't write a compelling novel about the Depression that still resonates in the 21st Century. Try Edward Anderson's HUNGRY MEN instead.
The Dream Life of Balso Snell (** 1/2)
I was tempted to give up on this one after a few pages as it started off in a rather tedious manner. Balso stumbles across the Trojan Horse and enters through its anus, where he runs into a number of strange characters with stories to tell. It is all very stream-of-consciousness and appears to be a random collection of things that West may have written some other time and is just pasting in, but it does take on a certain rhythm and momentum as it goes along, and there are some pretty humorous moments, mostly consisting of incongruous lists, as well as good insight into living your life in literature rather than in the real world, love, and suicide. I can't say it is all that good in the end, but at least it didn't leave me exasperated as A Cool Million did! show less
A Cool Million (* 1/2)
Naive Lemuel Pitkin heads out to the big city to earn enough money to keep the home he and his mother rent from being sold out from under them. Along the way, he is assisted (?) by a peculiar ex-President who draws him into a radical new political movement. The series of injuries Lemuel suffers become more and more extreme as he is taken advantage of by a series of con men or is blamed for something he didn't do. Clearly West intends this as a great, rollicking black satire of Depression-era America, with Communists and Jewish bankers as the cartoon villains. It just doesn't work, however. We may stand and marvel at show more the goings on a little bit, but there is nothing really here to see. And it isn't that you can't write a compelling novel about the Depression that still resonates in the 21st Century. Try Edward Anderson's HUNGRY MEN instead.
The Dream Life of Balso Snell (** 1/2)
I was tempted to give up on this one after a few pages as it started off in a rather tedious manner. Balso stumbles across the Trojan Horse and enters through its anus, where he runs into a number of strange characters with stories to tell. It is all very stream-of-consciousness and appears to be a random collection of things that West may have written some other time and is just pasting in, but it does take on a certain rhythm and momentum as it goes along, and there are some pretty humorous moments, mostly consisting of incongruous lists, as well as good insight into living your life in literature rather than in the real world, love, and suicide. I can't say it is all that good in the end, but at least it didn't leave me exasperated as A Cool Million did! show less
Certainly lacking in contrast, both of these works percolate in the fears and insecurities of not only a nation unsure of regaining its footing, there is something fundamental in his horror, Edmund Wilson was correct, West was our Kafka.
A Cool Million is an unsubtle but funny parody of Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches tales; The Dream Life of Balso Snell is a bizarre early effort without plot or much interest. It goes almost without saying that neither is remotely equal to Miss Lonelyhearts or The Day of The Locust, but then very few books are.
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Author Information
21+ Works 6,807 Members
American novelist Nathanael West was born in New York City, the son of a prosperous building contractor. He began his college education at Tufts University but transferred to Brown University, from which he graduated in 1924. After graduation, West went to Europe and lived in Paris for a few years, where he wrote the short novel The Dream Life of show more Balso Snell (1931), an avant--garde work that reflected his concern with the emptiness of contemporary life. West's modest legacy of completed works reached its peak of recognition during the period when later Jewish American writers were discovering black humor. Among novels that chronicle the wasteland despair and grotesque comedy of the time between the wars, West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939) stand out as remarkable examples. The first is about a young man conducting a column of advice to the lovelorn who finds it increasingly impossible not to share the problems of his readers. The Day of the Locust story about a riot that ends with the burning of Los Angeles. If Franz Kafka (see Vol. 2) had lived to come to the United States and become a screenwriter, he might have written a book like The Day of the Locust, which Malcolm Cowley called the best novel ever written about Hollywood. West's other short novel, A Cool Million (1934), is, like The Dream Life of Balso Snell, an experimental work that offers variations on the theme of reality and illusion; both works look toward a literature of the absurd and deserve their place in literary history as influences on a school of American writers that came into prominence during the 1960s. West's own life had aspects of tragic absurdity. He was married to Eileen McKenney, the original of the central figure in My Sister Eileen, while his own sister became the wife of humorist S. J. Perelman. After writing Miss Lonelyhearts, West and his wife went to Hollywood and remained there until they were both killed in a car accident in 1940. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1931 (The Dream Life of Balso Snell) (The Dream Life of Balso Snell); 1934 (A Cool Million) (A Cool Million)
- Epigraph
- "John D. Rockefeller would give a cool million to have a stomach like yours."
--OLD SAYING - Dedication
- To S. J. PERELMAN
- First words
- The home of Mrs. Sarah Pitkin, a widow well on in years, was situated on
an eminence overlooking the Rat River, near the town of Ottsville in the
state of Vermont. It was a humble dwelling much the worse for wear, yet - Quotations
- the world is an oyster that but waits for hands to open it. Bare hands are best. (a cool million)
It doesn't take much courage to hit a dog on the head with a stick. (a cool million)
if you can't make money in New York, you can't make money antwhere. (a cool million)
Cold water is an excellent cure for morbidity.
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- Reviews
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- Languages
- English, French
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- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
- ASINs
- 19
