5 stars. We wholeheartedly recommend Jess Walter's carefully crafted work of historical fiction (October 2020).
By Anisha K.
I confess to not having read Jess Walter’s work before, despite his being a critically acclaimed author, and The Cold Millions a widely anticipated release. The teaser I was able to glean from the internet—something about two tramp brothers navigating life in the early-20th-century West—had me believing I wouldn’t enjoy the read that much.
Thankfully, I was wrong!
The Cold Millions is my favorite read of this year, and I’ll definitely be revisiting it often. Walter sets his story in Spokane, Washington in 1909, where labor union agitation is growing and classes are clashing over the right to freedom of speech. The central storyline follows Rye Dolan, a seventeen-year-old homeless itinerant worker, who gets caught up in a whirlwind adventure after he follows his older brother Gig to a union demonstration. Rye is thrown into a world where good and evil become ambiguous, people and their motives convoluted and dark, and betrayal has layers like an onion—all the while struggling to find something to fight for. Walter masterfully sustains the thrill of the chase throughout the book as the stakes climb ever-higher. Plot twists abound, as does grief, made ever more poignant by the occasional, aching moment of hope.
Despite the fast-paced plot, nothing feels gimmicky or overdone; no character, dialogue, description, or detail seems unnecessary. Walter brings gravity to the topics he touches on, which include privilege based on class, sex, and race, as well as the ties of family and love. He uses his diverse cast of characters to shed light on such struggles, without defining them by their race or socioeconomic status. Each fleshed-out character had me doubting my first impressions of them as Walter uncovered their complex motives and backstories. He is able to capture each character’s distinctive voice as he switches between Rye’s third-person point of view and other first-person chapters peppered throughout the book. The relationships he writes are realistic, and the romance, though understated, is moving.
As I read, The Cold Millions struck me as similar to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. I’m not yet sure why I feel this way, but it likely has something to do with Walter’s painfully honest, even blunt language, and his talent for walking the line between exaggeration and reality so finely that a passage can seem absurd and incredibly realistic at the same time. The Cold Millions doesn’t have quite as much pathetic humor as Slaughterhouse-Five, but both books tackle human conflict without romanticizing it.
While I appreciate the depth of Walter’s research on how people spoke at the time, I feel like the nuance may be lost on readers in lines like: “...brother Danny [was] a pond monkey in an Oregon timber camp until he side-spiked a rain-slick log boom…” Maybe it’s just me, but I’m still not quite sure what that means. When you consider his poetic, richly satisfying prose and labyrinthine sentences, though, the obscure language hardly seems to matter. “Sleep. Sunlight in dreams I did not want to leave,” he writes, as a character battles sickness. “I looked for my mother to put her face against my fevered cheek, to use my name, to chide me, anything, but still she did not come.”
To anyone who’s looking to cry, learn, and be inspired all at once, I wholeheartedly recommend The Cold Millions. Even if it doesn’t seem up your alley at first, I urge you to give it a chance. Especially considering this political climate, it is thought-provoking and pertinent while still offering that sweet, well-written escape all readers crave.
This book contains explicit scenes and language, as well as descriptions of violence
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