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A review by thaurisil
Miss Lonelyhearts and A Cool Million by Nathanael West
3.0
Written during the Depression, these two novellas carry similar themes, but are written in very different styles. Miss Lonelyhearts tells of a newspaper columnist who writes an advice column. Despite the moniker, he's male. He thinks of himself as a Christ-like figure to his readers, yet he struggles about believing in Christ, and his fluffy generalisations about life seem unequal to the real burdens of his writers. His boss Shrike is a cynic, treating the whole column as a money-making joke. Miss Lonelyhearts' own interactions with the people around him ends mostly in depravity, violence and sex. Finally he achieves a state of moral high ground, but it is an apathetic state, as close as he can get to being Christ-like yet far removed from it. Right at the end, as a man hurt by him comes to kill him, Miss Lonelyhearts rushes to him in a loving embrace, and he is shot and killed in an act reminiscent of Christ's death.
A Cool Million is about Lemuel Pitkin, an honest, good-hearted, poor boy who, spurred on by the encouragement of ex-president Mr Whipple and the American Dream, seeks his fortune in New York to protect his house from being sold. Instead of prosperity, he meets injustice. He loses his teeth, an eye, a leg and his scalp, is imprisoned twice and beaten up multiple times, sees the girl he fancies forced into prostitution, and is finally killed. The story ends with him being celebrated as a martyr for the American Dream.
The two stories are similar in mood yet vastly different in their writing styles. Miss Lonelyhouse requires more effort and reflection to identify the motifs and analogies, but A Cool Million is a harder pill to swallow because you shudder with every sentence to read of how Lem will next be tricked or beaten or otherwise unrighteously dealt by. Each has its own unique tone. Miss Lonelyhearts is written mostly in an objective, clipped, newspaper-like tone which contrasts sharply with the heartfelt, ungrammatical letters written to Miss Lonelyhearts. A Cool Million on the other hand has an easy, light-hearted, almost fairy tale like tone that clashes with and highlights the bitterness of Lem's fate.
I wouldn't say either story is easy to read. They are bitter and painful, and there is almost no hope of redemption. But they are stories written by a brilliant author in an era that unfortunately made them wholly appropriate tales.
A Cool Million is about Lemuel Pitkin, an honest, good-hearted, poor boy who, spurred on by the encouragement of ex-president Mr Whipple and the American Dream, seeks his fortune in New York to protect his house from being sold. Instead of prosperity, he meets injustice. He loses his teeth, an eye, a leg and his scalp, is imprisoned twice and beaten up multiple times, sees the girl he fancies forced into prostitution, and is finally killed. The story ends with him being celebrated as a martyr for the American Dream.
The two stories are similar in mood yet vastly different in their writing styles. Miss Lonelyhouse requires more effort and reflection to identify the motifs and analogies, but A Cool Million is a harder pill to swallow because you shudder with every sentence to read of how Lem will next be tricked or beaten or otherwise unrighteously dealt by. Each has its own unique tone. Miss Lonelyhearts is written mostly in an objective, clipped, newspaper-like tone which contrasts sharply with the heartfelt, ungrammatical letters written to Miss Lonelyhearts. A Cool Million on the other hand has an easy, light-hearted, almost fairy tale like tone that clashes with and highlights the bitterness of Lem's fate.
I wouldn't say either story is easy to read. They are bitter and painful, and there is almost no hope of redemption. But they are stories written by a brilliant author in an era that unfortunately made them wholly appropriate tales.