Miss Lonelyhearts: And the Day of the Locust
by Nathanael West
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nathanael WestEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1975-01
ISBN: 0811202151
Number of pages: 247
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Book Reviews of Miss Lonelyhearts: And the Day of the Locust
Book Review: Not So Quiet Desperation
Summary: 5 Stars
Gin-soaked Christ for the Lovelorn:
The 'Miss Lonelyhearts' of Nathanael West's 1933 novella is a male reporter for the New York Post-Dispatch, whose cynical, boozy, manic editor Shrike has assigned him the task of responding with advice to myriads of heartsick/soulsick letter-writers. Bozzy and bipolar himself, Miss L - no other name is given him - at first takes his role as a huge joke, until the heartsickness he discovers begins to resonate with his own religious despair. In the first sentence, we readers find him at his desk, painfully unable to produce the necessary hypocritical pap to meet his copy deadline. West writes:
""When Miss Lonelyhearts quit work, he found that the weather had turned warm and that the air smelt as if it had been artificially heated. He decided to walk to Delehanty's speakeasy for a drink. In order to get there, it was necessary to cross a little park.
He entered the park park at the North Gate and swallowed mouthfuls of the heavy shade that curtained its arch. he walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on the path like a spear. It pierced him like a spear.
As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.
What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and all the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet.""
That, I submit, is awfully fine writing, imaginatively equal to the best of Nabokov, and fine writing is the fundamental reason for reading fiction, isn't it? But it's also awfully focused, concentrated writing. The spear metaphor, for instance, hints ever so subtly of the spear that pierced the side of Christ on the Cross, especially since Christ had already been alluded to, semi-jocularly, a page earlier. Slowly and slyly, West lets us sense that this short tale of world-weary absurdity is a Passion play, and that the foolish pleas and plaints of the maimed, grotesque, hapless correspondents are the sum of human woe. And for the Cynic, to empathize even scornfully with the woes of humanity is fatal.
Readers familiar with the stories and novellas of Flannery O'Connor will surely notice an affinity, possibly even a transmission of influence from West in the 1930s to O'Connor in the late 1940s and 1950s. West's characters, however, are both less grotesque and more intriguing - being more accessible to sympathy - than O'Connor's. Likewise, West's Christ-hunger is less inhumane, less anti-humanist, than O'Connor's hate-soaked hopelessness. One could imagine a benign God feeling pity for West's sad sinners.
I read this book in college, decades ago, and immediately recommended it to my high-school-aged sister, who wrote a 'book report' on it. Neither of us remember what she wrote, or what we thought then that the book was about, but my sister's English teacher - a former local beauty queen - gave the paper an F. "You were supposed to read a classic," she jeered, "not something you picked up from the rack at the bus station!"
I've got news for her; this is a classic. I'm profoundly glad that I picked it up again.
****
Apocalypse with Palm Trees:
Too bad Nathanael West didn't live long enough to work with the Coen Brothers! Instead he wrote screenplays for B-grade films in a Hollywood that considered language an obstacle to art. Luckily he also found scraps of time to write five novellas and a couple of stories, and two of those novellas - Day of the Locust & Miss Lonelyhearts - are in a class by themselves, the most original and incisive American fiction of the 1930s.
Day of the Locust is a wild and willful satire of Hollywood and the film industry, a Coen Brothers film in very well-crafted prose, killingly funny and at the same time fearfully sad. The focus character is an artist who has come to Hollywood to escape the art-school banality of painting red barns and lily-pads. Now he's working on a single apocalyptic painting -- "Hollywood in Flames" -- depicting the desperate anomie of "those who have come to California to die." In the foreground of his painting will be all the bizarre hapless cast of people in his own grungy screenplay life. The painting is the novella, and the novella is the painting, a point that many readers seem to have missed. It's a quick read, friends, and a tightly assembled script, and I don't really want to mute the excitement of reading it by blabbing too much of the action.
As a depiction of Southern California as it was in the 1930s, it's worth a thousand books of sociology, rich with sketches of "...the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers - all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence... marching behind his banner in a great unified front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land." Not even Raymond Chandler ever captured the tawdry menace and lurid intoxication of Los Angeles as well as West. Hollywood was truly the Potemkin Village of desires, where everyone was his own leading lady and the next person's 'extra'.
And it's bigger and better-dressed today - Los Angeles, I mean - with the Getty Museum and the Disney Center for the Arts, but anyone who has lived or worked there will know that 'The Day of the Locust' is still a true picture of its permanent impermanence and ever-impending transience.
****
The two novellas are not as similar as their verbal style makes them seem. The lust for Christian securities that West exposed in himself in Miss Lonelyhearts is not sustained in Day of the Locust. The latter novel resolves West's religious quest in total apocalyptic nihilism. The poignant pitiful individuals whose letters tormented Miss L have become the insensate raging mob of 'modern' life.
Summary of Miss Lonelyhearts: And the Day of the Locust
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Two short novels, one set in New York and the other in Hollywood, dramatically depict the extremes of the human condition and the destructive forces pervading modern American life.Literary Books
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