Bicoastal Depression-era kiss-off: Lonelyhearts is about New York, journalism, the paralyzing cynicism of the overeducated; Locust is about L.A., entertainment, the wasteful mobilization of the naive. West writes in short chapters, with plain diction and little extraneous tissue in his prose, and a steady stream of strange and abrupt images or oberservations. The person I've read who writes most like him is Richard Brautigan -- in both cases you picture a lonely man, hunched over a keyboard. Though temperamentally they couldn't be more opposed: Brautigan is bipolar, gentle, romantic; West is pitiless, caustic, very Catholic. (Wait, turns out he was Jewish. Really? His hang-ups seem somehow otherwise. Also, the almost complete absence of Jewish characters in satires of the newspaper and movie business is an odd omission for a writer of the time, Jewish or otherwise, to make -- even if the books are more concerned with the audiences of the respective media than the producers. Anyway.) Anyway, I'm curious to read more, and to see the movies he screenwrote, partly because I'm skeptical about his versatility. A seminal satiric perspective, I'm told (though the idea of a time before Hollywood-as-two-dimensional-dreamland satires seems impossible, doesn't it?), but it leaves a bitter taste: So, Nat, now that you've cast a bilious eye in all directions... what's left?