The short tragic life of Nathanael West produced four novels. Dying penniless and alone, West bequeathed a literary legacy that has reverberated in the works of Alexander Theroux and Thomas Pynchon. The two works collected here, “Miss Lonelyhearts,” a long short story, and The Day of the Locust, a novella; offer the reader a sampling of West’s scathing apocalyptic satire. In little over 180 pages, the reader encounters ferocious black humor, hard-boiled surrealism, and apocalyptic visions. Nathanael West belongs to the family of innovative literary Modernists like T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and William Faulkner.
“Miss Lonelyhearts” is a story about an advice columnist tap-dancing on the edge of existential despair. The short story, for all its bleakness, ferocious satire, and visionary set pieces, runs only 58 pages in my New Directions paperback. Written in 1933, the short story recreates the psychological depression crushing the nation. The desolate psychology mirrors the economic situation, the lack of money, options, and hope coloring the letters sent to Miss Lonelyhearts.
Miss Lonelyhearts, a hard-drinking male writer with lapsed religious convictions, writes the so-called “agony column” for the New York Post-Dispatch. He tries to deal with the problems of the writers in a genuine sincere way, but harassment by his boss, the crass editor named Shrike, undercuts his ability to his job. The passive-aggressive workplace relationship also occurs in Alexander Theroux’s sprawling, capacious, encyclopedic satire of modern American life, Laura Warholic, or the Sexual Intellectual. Shrike throws out different solutions: art, religion, and sex.
West writes with verve and power, pushing the reader closer and closer to the brink of despair. While the humor is black and vicious, it gives respite from the letters, each a tiny ingot of suffering and misspelling. “And on most days he received more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife.” He describes a sad little park where “It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.” After a night of drinking, Miss Lonelyhearts takes a bath, “but his heart remained a congealed lump of icy fat.” “Miss Lonelyhearts” reads like His Girl Friday if Samuel Beckett wrote the script.
Article comments