A Cool Million - Literary Significance & Criticism

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.

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?

Though most of the early criticism dismissed the novel as too direct of a parody to have any real literary merit, it is seen by some as an early example of postmodernism. 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. Bloom also deems the rhetoric used by Shagpoke Whipple as prophetic of such presidents as Ronald Reagan.