I really didn’t like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, so this review is going to be a lot briefer than usual. Frank Chambers is a drifter who one day finds himself on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He wanders into the Twin Oaks Tavern, owned by Nick Papadakis, and takes a job. Intense attraction sparks between Frank and Nick’s wife, Cora, and they plot to kill Nick so they can be together, succeeding only on their second attempt. The police suspect them of wrongdoing and reveal that Nick had taken out a hefty life insurance plan after the first attempt on his life, and assume that the payout due was the pair’s motivation. In the clear after some knotty legal finagling, they decide to start their new life together but, c’mon, do you really expect a happy ending here?
“Then he came along. I took him, and so help me, I meant to stick by him. But I can’t stand it any more. God, do I look like a little white bird?”
“To me, you look more like a hell cat.”
The Postman Always Rings Twice is told in a sparse, dialogue driven prose with a quick and sharp rhythm. No time is wasted on motivation or detail, Frank’s desire and reasoning goes largely unexplained. The relationship between Frank and Cora lacks the passion to make their crimes seem convincing. If Cora was too delicate to hurt Nick’s feelings by leaving him, how does that morph into murderous intent? The pedestrian, dispassionate prose makes these characters difficult to comprehend. Where in The Maltese Falcon Hammett’s crime story was written in the stylish prose that defined the hardboiled genre, Cain’s lacks excitement, character or dense plot. Very disappointing.
After reading Miss Lonelyhearts and The Dream Life of Balso Snell, I was left thinking “this Nathanael West dude is ten shades of grim, but at least he’s got a sense of humour about it.” Reading West’s third novel, A Cool Million, reaffirms this thought. West isn’t afraid to drag his characters through physical and mental hell, but somehow – mainly due to his use of black humour – he doesn’t take the reader on the same trip. Apparently A Cool Million is a “brutal satire of Horatio Alger’s novels of eternal optimism”, but as I’m not familiar with Alger’s work (or, heh, eternal optimism), much of the commentary on this level eludes my understanding. However, A Cool Million works as a dissection of hopeful gullibility and blind faith in strangers, tearing down the American dream of striking it rich.
Lemuel Pitkin is the hopeless hopeful of A Cool Million, a young boy who sets out on the advice of his admired elders to make money to save his family home from being repossessed. But this isn’t the story of a young scout making his fortune through hard work and sheer determination, rather our friend Lem inherently trusts everyone he meets – and is taken advantage of in every manner possible. Lem trusts the insight of his elders, especially the wacky Mr. Shagpoke Whipple who leads him in the wrong direction every single time. Lem’s lack of consciousness and awareness of the greed and deceit of others is astounding. Not only does our man Lem lose his money, over and over, but he loses his eye, his teeth, his thumb, his leg and his scalp, but never his blind hope; the same cannot be said for his dignity.
Lem lost track of Mr. Whipple when the meeting broke up, and was unable to find him again although he searched everywhere. As he wandered around, he was shot at several times, and it was only by the greatest of good luck that he succeeded in escaping with his life.
He managed this by walking to the nearest town that had a depot and there taking the first train bound northeast. Unfortunately, all his money had been lost in the opera house fire and he was unable to pay for a ticket. The conductor, however, was a good-natured man. Seeing that the lad had only one leg, he waited until the train slowed down at a curve before throwing him off.
It’s not only Lem that suffers misfortune at the hands of others – his sweetheart Betty is beaten and sold as a sex slave into a brothel that features a woman from every country on earth. When chance gives Lem the opportunity to rescue her, he fails in his mission and instead is put to work in the brothel as well – only to disgust a rich maharajah when his teeth and glass eye fall out. It seems somehow fitting that Lem ends up in the entertainment industry, at first as a sideshow feature (the last man to be scalped by Indians!) and then as a stooge for a comedy duo. Then he is shot, on stage while giving a political speech to incite favour for Whipple’s new political party, by a mysterious figure who has shown up previously. In death, Lem becomes a martyr for Whipple’s cause and they sing celebratory songs in his honour.
I can’t help but wonder whether, as it seems much of A Cool Million‘s commentary seems to rely on a knowledge of Horatio Alger’s novels, that it loses some of the urgency or power without this point of reference. That A Cool Million appears to be one of West’s minor works – in an oeuvre of four short novels – seems to confirm this suspicion. However, if you like your fiction bleak, your protagonist downtrodden (and then some), and your pessimism reaffirmed – A Cool Million is a comedy of the blackest variety.
Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust is such a curious novel. At once acerbic social satire and vicious family melodrama, it examines the question of social propriety among the upper echelons of the moneyed classes and yet loses steam in the last third of the novel. For the most part, however, it beautifully illustrates the ultimate cruelties and snide savagery that humans are all too capable of.
‘That’s always the trouble with people when they start walking out. They either think no one knows, or everybody. The truth is that a few people like Polly and Sybil make a point of finding out about everyone’s private life; the rest of us just aren’t interested.’
Waugh begins the novel by introducing us to John Beaver, a hideous young man of little social standing – he’s always being called up at the last moment to fill in empty seats at dinner parties, he’s something of a joke within the moneyed social circle he moves in. Waugh moves on and introduces the Lasts, Lady Brenda and her husband Tony and their precocious child John Andrew, living in the Gothic surrounds of Tony’s familial estate Hetton. Their lifestyle seems to be largely idyllic, they don’t want for anything and Brenda and Tony’s relationship appears to be healthy and thriving, if a little fallen to routine. Into this idyll the unexpected arrival of Beaver has a profound effect on Lady Brenda, whose fascination with him leads her to London and eventually, embarking on a scandalous affair with the younger man. Scandalous not because of the age difference, or because she is already married – these sorts of frivolous affairs are quite common amongst the married set – but because of the disparity between their social positions. Brenda’s desire leads her to taking up a flat in London, apart from Tony, her son and Hetton.
It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone. For them her circumstances shed peculiar glamour; for five years she had been a legendary, almost ghostly name, the imprisoned princess of a fairy story, and now that she had emerged there was more enchantment in the occurrence than in the mere change of habit of any other circumspect wife. Her very choice of partner gave the affair an appropriate touch of fantasy; Beaver, the joke figure they had all known and despised, suddenly caught up to her among the luminous clouds of deity.
Waugh’s writing is careful not to lay the blame on either side of the marriage. Showing the moroseness of both John Andrew and Tony left behind in Hetton, not aware of why Brenda is so taken with London all of a sudden, shifts our sympathies from her boredom and listlessness to their loss. After the tragic death of John Andrew, Brenda feels compelled (or freed) to tell Tony the truth about Beaver and London and that she wants a divorce. Because of her social status and to maintain social propriety – despite the fact that everyone already knew about the affair – Tony’s lawyers go to great lengths to create marital disruptions on his side to allow the divorce to move smoothly. A clandestine weekend with a woman from a club is more comic that it should be given the circumstances. Once the divorce proceedings are underway, suddenly Brenda and company are talking about Tony’s mortifying actions that lead to the necessary divorce, which is a confusing about face. I suppose maintaining the reputation of her good name is more important that anything even close to resembling the truth.
‘I hear Brenda disgraced herself,’ he said.
‘Goodness,’ said Brenda. ‘People do think that young men are easily come by.’
Whereas the social comedy is largely written in sparkling dialogue, but when Tony ventures to avoid all divorce proceedings and familial manipulations by taking an exotic trip overseas the tone significantly changes. Rather than relying on conversations to drive the narrative forward, it takes on a very different, more reflective and descriptive tone once Tony is abroad. Here the novel lost me a bit. Tony’s travels may have been interesting in their own right, but to become so involved in the inner workings of the social circles of the Lasts and then to be torn right out of it had a somewhat jarring effect. Perhaps this is to suggest Tony’s equal removal from society through no real fault of his own?
After such effective portrayal of the petty worries of the London elite, the ending is rather unsatisfying and bleak. Tony is lost in Brazil, captive to an old man who forces him to read Dickens to him every night; Brenda has remarried, not to Beaver, but to another of Tony’s close friends, and Hetton has passed into the hands of Tony’s relatives. Reflecting on it, I suppose that in A Handful of Dust Waugh was trying to show that all humans are capable of great savagery – whether it is discussed discreetly among friends in beautifully decorated drawing rooms or in the remote jungles and clay huts of the tropics.
