** 76th book of 2020: Class struggle isn’t new **
“What was it about these steep, western, water-locked cities, Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco? All three I’d visited, and in all three, the money flowed straight uphill.”
The book exudes a bitterness about class society, where at the end of the belle-epoch, “all people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.” Our protagonists gawk at riding in rather than on the train car, or eating “gnocchi that might have been pinched from the ass of an Italian angel.” Yet beyond the cardboard cutout villain and our protagonist who mainly a narrative camera lens, it felt like the book didn’t have much to say. Even the title is a rehash of old concepts. The 8th century Tang poem comes to mind: 朱门酒肉臭，路有冻死骨: ‘While the poor masses freeze to death outside, the rich let wine and meat putrefy from excess.’
Cold millions goes for a detective novel, a political statement, a western, a thriller, and even a book on radicalization all rolled up in one. Jumping around through so many POV characters, it felt like a collection of short stories, none quite vivid enough to get my mind clicked in to the world of 1909 Spokane.
2nd family book club book.