A Horrifying Fairy Tale: Don't Tell This To Your Kids

Kafka's Amerika

Nathaniel West’s A Cool Million reminded me a lot of Kafka’s Amerika: protagonist is beaten to a pulp by the new world he thought he could handle, with only enough relief in between to get our hopes up enough to have them become crushable again. What was satire and what was sincere was hard to discern, for me – there were some awful racist quotes up front, said in sincerity (within the book) but debatable insincerity (from the author possibly writing a satirical book.) The time period, I think, is what made this less discernable – I had to google “Nathaniel West + Racist” to find out for myself. West seems to take the opposite strategy of Kromer in his attempt to convey the truth: he spins a completely bizarre, over-the-top tragic and nearly slapstick tale that is just plausible enough to still have us emotionally involved. In a way, it is a reductio ad absurdum: reducing the depression and its events until it becomes absurd. But the absurdity of it is the depression’s true absurdity: it is actually there. I started feeling indignant, almost, at the way he treated his characters, and I believe that was his motivation: for us to want to demand that he stop this nonsense, let go of the necks of all his characters and leave them alone. The same could be said about the depression, about the police, about the swindlers, the corrupt, all those beating down the already beaten down. It also had the feeling of a sort of twisted, perverse fairy tale; the characters were idyllic, basic: beautiful girl, endlessly sacrificial young hero-lad, trusty “Indian” sidekick, blundering but useful old man. This served to make the narrative even more offensive when it was so unrelentingly brutal and base, and provided the basis for our suspension of disbelief – that it all would be okay in the end, because this is a fairy tale – being destroyed in the end because absolutely nothing was alright. There was no moral, no reward of the right, no punishing of the wrong as in a proper fable. I loved reading this, because its absurdity and the whimsical form it took served to make it all the more brutal and offensive. What a fun and horrifying way to make a point about the Depression.