"Well, ahem!" was that suave individual's rejoinder

I just finished rereading Nathanael West, A Cool Million. Subtitled "The Dismantlement of Lemuel Pitkin", it did for Horatio Alger in 1934 what I suppose Team America: World Police has done for Jerry Bruckheimer in 2004.

We meet our hero, Lem, after Lawyer Slemp has delivered the foreclosure notice to widow Pitkin. Asa Goldstein has bought her house and intends to set it up, intact, in the window of his 5th Avenue store. For, "having been built about the time of General Stark's campagin against the British, its lines reflected the character of his army."

"What have you been saying to my mother to make her cry?"

"Stand aside, boy!" exclaimed the lawyer. He pushed Lem with such great force that the poor lad fell off the porch steps into the cellar, the door of which was unfortunately open. By the time Lem had extricated himself, Mr. Slemp was well on his way down the road."

Soon our hero is well on his way down the road as well, having borrowed, against the collateral of his mother's cow, $30 at 12% interest from the town's most prominent citizen, 'Shagpoke' Whipple, who "had once been President of the United States." Lem seems as much a match for the world as he is for the neighborhood bully, in a passage that gives a nice indication of the Algeresque style.

That Tom Baxter was not only larger but stronger than our hero was no doubt true. On the other hand he did not know how to use his strength. It was merely undisciplined brute force. If he could have got Lem around the waist the latter would have been at his mercy, but our hero knew that well enough and didn't choose to allow it. He was a pretty fair boxer, and stood on his defense, calm and wary.

But soon enough our hero loses consciousness, money, teeth, eye, scalp, leg. And Betty Prail - a girl "with whom he was in love in his boyish way" - is sold into white slavery. (That's a funny bit. You can 'search inside' at Amazon. 'This son of the Celestial Empire was a graduate of the Yale University in Shanghai and he spoke Italian perfectly' would take you to the right page. Alternatively, 'before the arrival of her first client, a pockmarked Armenian rug merchant from Malta'. The whole thing is very Sax Rohmer meets L'il Abner.)

Shagpoke keeps popping up, now down on his luck like our hero. "It was Wall Street working hand in hand with the communists that caused my downfall. The bankers broke me, and the Communist's circulated lying rumors about my bank in Doc Slack's barbershop. I was the victim of an un-American conspiracy." Lem falls innocent and unawares into the glim racket, mulkting storekeepers; Betty Prail labours in Wu Fong's house of ill fame; Shagpoke dabbles in fascist politics. "We of the middle class are being crushed between two gigantic millstones. Capital is the upper stone and Labor the lower ..." But the first rally of "Leather Shirt" stormtroops is broken up before they even acquire coonskin caps and a sufficiency of squirrel rifles.

This elaborate fat man tiptoed out of the crowd and made his way to a telephone booth in a nearby drug store, where he called two numbers.

His conversation with the person answering his first call, a Wall Street exchange, went something like this:

"Operative 6384XM, working out of the Bourse, Paris, France. Middle-class organizers functioning on unemployed front, corner of Houston and Bleecker streets."

"Thank you, 6384XM, what is your estimate?"

"Twenty men and a fire hose."

HIs second call was to an office near Union Square.

"Comrade R, please ... Comrade R?"

"Yes"

"Comrade R, this is Comrade Z speaking. Gay Pay Oo, Moscow, Russia. Middle-class organizers recruiting on the corner of Houston and Bleecker Streets."

"Your estimate, comrade, for liquidation of said activities?"

"Ten men with lead pipes and brass knuckles to cooperate with Wall Street office of the I.J.B."

"No bombs required?"

"No, comrade."

"Der Tag!"

Der Tag!"

So there's something almost Daniel Pinkwater-meets-paranoid-American populism about it, if you see what I mean.

Wu Fong's establishment falls on hard times. His 'House of All Nations' is re-branded as 'All-American', with design assistance from Asa Goldstein. Betty's colleague, Dolores, replaces Conchita in the Spanish room. Wu Fong "substituted a Mission chair for the horsehide one with the steer-horn arms and called it "Monterey". Asa Goldstein was very angry when he found out, but Wu Fong refused to do anything about it, because he felt that she was bound to be a losing proposition. The style, he said was not obviously enough American even in its most authentic forms."

Lem is briefly compelled into a sailor suit, but escapes the Maharajah's lisping embraces. More escape. Gold-mining out West. Betty falls prey to a Rip-Tailed Roarer. Chief Satinpenny goes on the war-path. "Don't mistake me, Indians. I'm no Rousseauistic philosopher. I know that you can't put the clock back. But there is one thing you can do. You can stop that clock. You can smash that clock ... The gates of pandemonium are open and through the land stalk the gods Mapeoo and Suraniou. The day of vengeance is here. The star of the paleface is sinking and he knows it. Spengler has said so; Valery has said so ..." Satinpenny is evidently in the pay of international forces, keeping his braves in machine-guns and whiskey.

A very moving speech from near the end, after Shagpoke's fascist Leathershirts have seized power. "Of what is it that he speaks? Of the right of every American boy to go into the world and there receive fair play and a chance to make his fortune by industry and probity without being laughed at or conspired against by sophisticated aliens."

I think Matthew Yglesias would find this book rather amusing, to judge by this post:

This is all compounded by the larger self-presentation of the conservative movement in America whose rhetoric is dripping with disdain for the entertainment industry, the legal profession, academia, book learnin', large cities and their inhabitants, cosmopolitanism, and the media. These are, however, all things associated with Jewish American life. And, indeed, their prominence in conservative rhetoric has its causal origins in the anti-semitism of an earlier period of American life. Though in the modern there's been a switch in the symbolic referent and the point is to associate liberalism with homosexuality and effeminacy (see also the inane "toughness" debate on national security) rather than Judaism, its no surprise that such rhetoric continues to lack appeal to the majority of American Jews. Now as it happens, I happen to know perfectly well that the conservative elites who run the Republican Party are nothing like the knuckle-dragging hick illiterates GOP politicians like to portray themselves as, but said self-portrayal was a deliberate (and reasonably effective) political strategy and one of its natural costs is to turn off Jews.

Plus A Cool Million comes economically bundled under one cover with The Dream Life of Balso Snell, about a guy trapped in the intestines of the Trojan Horse, among other things. "I am insane. I [the papers had it CULTURED FIEND SLAYS DISHWASHER] am insane." Poetry: "O Beast of Walls!/O Walled-in Fat Girl/ Your conquest was hardly worth ...", etc. So Balso has a touch of Flann O'Brien, just as Cool has a touch of Flannery O'Connor. Minus the religiosity.

Two thumbs up.