Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust

by Nathanael West

Miss Lonelyhearts

Miss Lonelyhearts was a newspaper reporter, so named because he had been assigned to write the agony column, to answer the letters from Desperate, Sick-of-It-All, Disillusioned. A joke at first; but then he was caught up, terrifyingly, in a vision of suffering, and he sought a way out, turning first here, then there—Art, Sex, Religion. Shrike, the cynical editor, the friend and enemy, compulsively destroyed each of his friend’s gestures toward idealism. Together, in the city’s dim underworld, Shrike and Miss Lonelyhearts turn round and round in a loathsome dance, unresolvable, hating until death…

The Day of the Locust

To Hollywood comes Tod Hackett, hoping for a career in scene designing, but he finds the way hard and falls in with others—extras, technicians, old vaudeville hands—who are also in difficulty. Around him he sees the great mass of inland Americans who have retired to California in expectation of health and ease. But boredom consumes them, their own emptiness maddens them; they search out any abnormality in their lust for excitement—drugs, perversion, crime. In the end only blood will serve; unreasoned, undirected violence. The day of the locust is at hand…

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Novels, American, Short Stories, 20th Century

247 pages, Paperback

First published May 16, 1939

About the author

Born Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein to prosperous Jewish parents, from the first West set about creating his own legend, and anglicising his name was part of that process. At Brown University in Rhode Island, he befriended writer and humourist S. J. Perelman (who later married his sister), and started writing and drawing cartoons. As his cousin Nathan Wallenstein also attended Brown, West took to borrowing his work and presenting it as his own. He almost didn't graduate at all, on account of failing a crucial course in modern drama. West indulged in a little dramatics of his own and, in tearful contrition, convinced a gullible professor to upgrade his marks.

After spending a couple of years in Paris, where he wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, he returned to New York, where he managed (badly by all accounts) a small hotel, the Sutton, owned by his family. As well as providing free board for struggling friends like Dashiell Hammett, the job also gave West ample opportunity to observe the strange collection of misfits and drifters who congregated in the hotel's drugstore. Some of these would appear in West's novel Miss Lonelyhearts.

West spent the rest of his days in Hollywood, writing B-movie screenplays for small studios and immersing himself in the unglamorous underworld of Tinseltown, with its dope dealers, extras, gangsters, whores and has-beens. All would end up in West's final masterpiece, The Day of the Locust.

West's life ultimately ended as tragically as his fictions. Recently married, and with better-paid script work coming in, West was happy and successful. Then, returning from a trip to Mexico with his wife Eileen, he crashed his car after ignoring a stop sign and killed them both. This was just one day after the death of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Reviews

[Fabian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miss Lonelyhearts, a novella that made the "1001 Books You Must Read" list, is a type of companion piece to Salinger's maudlin, crude, symbolic works about humanity. It is about an advice columnist who thinks he is a demi god, who ignores the troubles of everyone around him to the point of satire, who makes fun of the people he should save. Think: a lazy, lost, heartless Frasier Crane. His co workers are assholes as well. The plot takes an unexpected turn at its climax... the antihero's fate is sealed and he gets just what he deserves.

The irreverent "Day of the Locust" is about the moral decay of Hollywood. Los Angeles is a place where "people come to die." It is with this attitude, infused in the five or so interrelated vignettes, that we discover that the lost souls are selfish, indulgent, materialistic. Tod is a set designer who is in love with Faye Greener, a Fitzgeraldesque vixen, who pretty much beds all of his friends, works hard only for her professional advancement. But the reader knows that these girls, despite their enviable and covetable beauty, are dime a dozen. There is the tragic figure of Homer, the 40 year old prepared to get healthy eating California oranges & living a lax lifestyle. There are cock fights and visits to Zelsnick-like sets, there are dreamers & immigrants, there is even a climax at, very fittingly, a movie premiere. Almost as if something came full circle...

West only wrote these two, and I am glad to have heard his singular voice. Though "Locust" (oddly named) is a masterpiece, "Lonelyhearts" seems unfulfilled and too trite. They are eye-opening and remind me of why I get an eerie feeling about Los Angeles in the first place.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be honest, I was expecting something lighter. Here was the hook: Miss Lonelyhearts, an advice columnist in the early 30’s, is really a man. Sounds like a role for Jimmy Stewart at his gosh-darned chirpiest, doesn’t it? But the first few pages put a different image in mind – it was Pottersville without benefit of George Bailey. The letters in to Miss Lonelyhearts were just so bleak. Of course, it was a time when deprivations were de rigueur. Those lacking money, health, or wedded bliss had very little recourse. The joke, if there ever was one, was on him. (Note: he was only ever referred to as Miss Lonelyhearts, which makes me think we’re meant to know him as a 2-dimensional everyman.) His editor knew how hopeless these advice-seekers were, so it was a cruel act on his part to assign Miss L, a man with shaky mettle and faith as it was, to the task.

Once I replaced my rose-colored glasses with a much darker shade, I got attuned to the mood West was going for and the dystopia he envisioned. There was certainly a noir feel to it all. The book was interesting to view as an 80 year old time capsule, too. Lots of the interactions between Miss L, his editor, and various women took place in speakeasies. Fat lips were a common occurrence, and distinctions between lovemaking and rape weren’t as clear as they should have been. It was also a time when the word “gay” was used often and differently.

We’ve all seen reviews where the place is identified as a character. In this case, it seems more appropriate to say that the zeitgeist was. West, whose real name was Nathan Weinstein, was no doubt aware of the growing anti-Semitism. These were meaner times, in general, and it was easy to see how Miss Lonelyhearts, who had above-average levels of compassion and Christian good intent to begin with could become disaffected. Miss L went several rounds against the aforementioned zeitgeist, but you’ll just have to read the novella to find out how he fared.

The Day of the Locust shares a sense of alienation. The central character was Tod (the German word for dead) and the story follows him to Hollywood where his artistic ambitions are brought down a few notches as a painter of movie sets. This one was set in the Depression era, too. He falls for an aspiring actress, Faye Greener, who tells him upfront they’ll only ever be just friends because he had no pull in the movie biz. They meet an unfortunate but financially secure schlub from Iowa who was told to go West for health reasons. The guy lets Faye stay at his place which made things complicated since one of his reasons for leaving Iowa was to suppress sexual impulses. (Did West get his directions mixed up?) Anyway, this guy’s name, Homer Simpson, sent me straight to Google. As it turns out, Matt Groenig has given two answers to the obvious question, one being that it was from this character, the other being that his dad was the source.

These characters and a memorable set of others including Faye’s dad (a former vaudevillian), a hard-drinking, quick-tempered midget, a cowboy extra in movies and the cowboy’s Mexican friend (an expert in cock-fighting) existed at the margins of Hollywood. West got to know this world as a screenwriter so it seemed to ring true. It was truth at its darkest, though. Love was a sham, glamour-seekers were deluded, and the American dream failed both for its spirit and promise of riches.

West died in a car accident along with his wife the year after this was published. He was 37 years old. There’s no way we can know if a country lifted from The Great Depression would have lifted him, too. He would have at least been gratified to learn that this poignant latter work made the Modern Library Top 100 list as well as the one Time Magazine compiled.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you know what's wrong with this New Direction edition of West's most famous two little novels? Nothing. It's a perfect book. And it's a work that never gets old. The ultimate Hollywood nove (Day of the...)l that is almost spiritual. West got it right away and very few could match his greatness or snickering. A snicker that becomes passionate.

Miss Lonelyhearts is awesome beyond one's favorite mustard. It's a nasty little book that still stings. Hail West!

[Chris Via]

- Video review of Miss Lonelyhearts: https://youtu.be/GtmA-OtBplQ
- Video review of The Day of the Locust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr9Ib...

# First "review" #

Finally getting around to this little nail-bomb of a book that I've had shoved in my face almost every time I've read a book that has anything to do with American literature. I knew it was considered to be a searing work but I don't think I was quite ready for this caliber of laceration. West manages to parade the whole spectrum of human emotion and questioning on the edge of a cold, glinting razor. The unnamed character behind the Miss Lonelyhearts persona represents the Christian who struggles under the weight of the missives of suffering that bear down on his life. Playing counterpoint to Miss Lonelyhearts is his boss, Mr. Shrike, who symbolizes the hedonism of the pagan Renaissance humanist: "'Forget the crucifixion, remember the Renaissance'" he tell his underling (5). In roughly fifty-eight pages, we follow Miss Lonelyhearts as he plunges into despair and, as the final subheading tells us, has a religious experience (surely one of the most poetically shattering of endings). West certainly goes for viscera in this one, though he isn't above a little Pynchonian slapstick comedy (forgive the anachronism). "Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers" (39). On this stance, we get a story ripped free of the puerility of dreams.

# Second "review" #

I think I may need to start making MISS LONELYHEARTS mandatory quarterly reading. There were so many new things that I missed on my first read. I cannot believe how much West packed into 57 pages. This is a masterclass on short story writing that is both artistic and meaningful--it excels at aesthetics and content. I think I'll make a video talking about it soon.

[Amanda NEVER MANDY · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unsettling, harsh, and wildly inappropriate mixed with a blandness that could put a reader to sleep in seconds. This book has weighed on my mind in a way others haven’t in a while. My finger hovered above the two and four stars button far too long due to my struggle with content versus writing style.

CONTENT: I’m just floored by the amount of crude and offensive material this author covered in such a nonchalant way. Abrupt topic introductions that led me to either reread to make sure what I perceived as being written was in fact what he had written, or to close the book with feelings of repulsion and question if I even wanted to continue. I really struggled with weighing the then versus now, and allowing the author leeway because the times have indeed changed. BUT a dislike of a concept is sometimes universal regardless of its tolerances throughout time, and the artistic license that times gone by grant doesn’t make it something I have to be okay with. So petty me docked it a star for its various sins.

WRITING STYLE: To write about nothing that is smothered with angst and randomly placed bits of repugnant story is oddly captivating. I alternated between feelings of boredom, irritation, amusement and disgust. The mental images his writing created were almost horror like in my mind. From a distance a pristine character all done up in powder and bows; on closer inspection a barely contained almost mechanical being riddled with cracks and smudges. So damn off-putting.

Oh and I can’t forget: Homer. Freaking. Simpson.

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

--The Day of the Locust
--Miss Lonelyhearts

[Jimmy Cline · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one moral prevails throughout the two novels that Nathanael West has become famous for, it would probably be that, even in the dreariest of times, people can find salvation or refuge from suffering through art. At least this is what Miss Lonelyheart's boss, Mr. Shrike informs him of as a substitute for religion. In Shrike's own words he asks "Why don't you give them something new and hopeful? Tell them about art. Here, I'll dictate: Art Is a Way Out". The only problem with this suggestion is that, when applied to West's loathsome characters, it's essentially worthless. This almost specifically applies to Miss Lonelyhearts himself, a man who is so obsessed with such an ostensible social paradox; he doesn't really care about others, but he's so driven by his own narcissistic urge to "help people", as well as his even more selfish need to avoid loneliness despite the fact that he's a misanthrope in the vein of Dostoevsky's Underground Man, that he is completely oblivious to the rather accessible happiness that is all around him. It's problematic though because most of West's characters are exactly like this. They are ne'er do well's who wear social masks of benevolence and kindness.

Take Homer Simpson's character in Day of the Locust. While he isn't quite as selfish as Miss Lonelyhearts, he'll never metamorphose out of his bumbling, oafish being because his self-loathing is channeled into amorous distractions. What part of himself he neglects to address is eventually expressed in a severely questionable act of violence toward the end of the novel. Readers may feel sympathetic toward Homer for a majority of the story, but a hapless character can only be sympathetic for so long, until they are merely perceived as pathetic.

This is, of course, an interpretive bent. It's possible that West actually felt more sympathy than disgust when sketching these characters. Contrast usually determines the rest with stories such as these. Let's consider the other characters, the obvious wretches of West's depression-era hell.

There's Shrike, Miss Lonelyheart's boss. This is a man who knowingly lets Miss Lonelyhearts go to bed with his wife, merely so he can humiliate him in an emotionally naked situation. He's also a cocky, insensitive, boorish liar. A newspaper man; a crook making profit off of the misery of others. Then again, so does West in a way.

Or Tod Hackett, the Hollywood scene designer in Day of the Locust, a man who was clearly modeled after West himself, maybe not a screenwriter but someone trying to make his way in the entertainment industry all the same (West worked for RKO Radio Pictures, and penned thirteen scripts in his lifetime). Hackett, a man of some moral conviction, slowly degenerates into someone inundated by an uncontrollable desire for Faye Greener, an actress, in a way, the symbol of everything that he seems to hate about Hollywood, and all of Southern California for that matter. We can even see his tolerance for Homer Simpson eventually become replaced by hatred and contempt, albeit at that point Homer's mind has pretty much left the world of reason and sanity.

So then maybe it's the sideshow-like characters of West's bleak universe that really matter; the grotesqueries, the one's that we initially ignored because we felt that their flaws and shortcomings were far too despicable and obvious. If the brief character sketches given here offer anything though, it's that nobility is absent and goodness is pretty much relative, if even existent in these two stories. It works though. Both of West's masterpieces (and they are in many ways) waste no time at driving these ideas home. He was so ruthless in his depiction of the madness of his times, that even he probably understood that he would be included in this world when critics looked back at his biography and his stories. Although, this sort of image probably concerned him as much as the concept of pride, a notion that has no meaning in West's work.

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts -

I am in such pain I dont know what to do sometimes I think I will kill myself my kidneys hurt so much. My husband thinks no woman can be a good catholic and not have children irregardless of the pain. I was married honorable for our church but I never knew what married life meant as I never was told about man and wife. My grandmother never told me and she was the only mother I had but made a big mistake by not telling me as it dont pay to be inocent and is only a big disappointment. I have 7 children in 12 yrs and ever since the last 2 I have been so sick. I was operatored on twice and my husband promised no more children on the doctors advice as he said I might die but when I got back from the hospital he broke his promise and now I am going to have a baby and I don't think I can stand it my kidneys hurts so much. I am so sick and scared because I cant have an abortion on account of being a catholic and my husband so religious. I cry all the time it hurts so much and I dont know what to do.

Yours respectfully

Sick-of-it-all

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

West is a prophet of the 20th century American wasteland, with one crucial difference: whereas Isaiah's wheel within a wheel is evidence of god's presence and mystery, West's trembling metaphors sing only Absence, Absence. False signs in other words, like whoopee cushions that someone (God, we hope, or think we hope) has left under the various sofa-cushions of human existence. But what is the difference between a sign and a false sign? I wonder that while reading the various movie-related descriptions in Day of the Locust, all of which are magisterial, like slow-motion captures of horses running, hummingbirds, bullets exploding apples. West's prose is a sharp and pitiless substance. It creeps like tar over the drowning prehistorics of 1930s Hollywood, leaving no spot uncovered. And I guess that's what I love, and hate, about him. No softness. You cannot imagine anything escaping; but a Holocaust perpetuated against lego men (that is, against characters who we feel are being set up only to be knocked down, the game weighted unfairly) ends up being, not terrible (or, not only terrible), but funny: as if god appeared as some sort of gigantic praying mantis or clown, and yet critically did not realize that this was, perhaps, a less than dignified form to take. Like god's the one who doesn't get it. I feel contorted.

[gaby · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Violence in America is idiomatic." Nathanael West (Nathan Weinstein)

Reading West is to be struck, as in the face, again and again by his visceral sexual violence. It's frustrating but not surprising that the main literary legacy of West is a more generic brutality -- without acknowledgment that much of that violence is sexual in nature and theme. This shines brightest in Day of the Locust, where the very West-ian Homer Simpson (could it be a coincidence????) struggles hourly as though sex was a virus in him, struggles to keep it dormant, plagued with a chronic worry that it might break out and crush the wholeness of a girl "like an egg in the palm of his hand." Elsewhere, our narrator Tod fantasizes about rape while eating a steak dinner, musing over "A feeling, already, of what it would be like to push her down." This violence and obsession is foreshadowed in Miss Lonelyhearts, who "buries his face like a hatchet into her neck," but it's a more subdued thing in that novella. It blossoms in full force in Day of the Locust as a steady, ugly compulsion - the will to injure women, to rape, molest -- it becomes clear in Day of the Locust that it was something more than an occasionally ugly turn of phrase. I understand, of course, that there really was a legitimate metaphor in this obsession -- Los Angeles, and particularly Hollywood, invites dishonor in that way; its inhabitants feel a compulsion to seek its attention by any means necessary. But to discuss West without acknowledging the obvious dimension of gender politics is to do a disservice to history and to his work. It wasn't just a metaphor -- and even if it was, we might as well unpack it.

The other stars of these books are their cities -- New York in Miss Lonelyhearts and Los Angeles in Day of the Locust. New York is a frantic maze of stairs and skyscrapers; but Los Angeles stretches out lazily across the desert. West writes of Los Angeles at a time when there was a real symbiosis between the city itself and Hollywood - both were lawless and lovely then, coarse and brutal; they shared an easy economy between mechanical lenses and streets; to see one was to see the other. Things have changed -- the two have not quite grown together. A bitterness, yes, an ennui has come to overshadow the luster. But it's something more -- perhaps it's just that the city has gotten too big to be congruent with Hollywood. Too big, too diverse. The lawlessness is disconnected, or more diffuse. You can still catch the light just right sometimes, in the corners of the Hollywood Hills or downtown. But the two have outgrown each other; nothing left but memories and innuendo. I love reading about Old Los Angeles - and there's just no one who wrote about it better than West.

[Tahmineh Baradaran · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب در پانزده قسمت کوتاه نوشته شده که هرقسمت با نام میس لونلی هارتزشروع میشود. ستون نویس روزنامه ای که مردی است که برای مشکلات دیگران راه حل ارائه میکند. زمان ، دهه سی میلادی و بحران اقتصادی آمریکا ومکان لوس آنجلس است . تلخ و گاهی شوخ . .وپایانی غریب برای برخی قسمتها و برای آن دوران .

" زندگی باشگاهیه که توش جیغ وداد کسی روتحمل نمیکنن. به شما فقط اجازه ی یه دست بازی میدن وباید تا آخر هم پای بازی بشینین . پس حای اگرکارت هاتون آشغال باشن ، بازم بازی کنین ، مثل یک نجیب زاده....ویادتون باشه وقتی ریسک ضرر روقبول می کنین ، باید بازی روتاتهش ادامه بدین و جیغ وداد نکنین .."

به نظرسانسورهم شده باشد .

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I re-read these two short novels in a fit of sentimentality.

When I was a sophomore at USC, I took an American Literature class, ENGL 263. Taught by a man named Gustafson, this was my only venture into "properly" studying books written on this continent. During my undergraduate years, I really concentrated in stuffy, dead English writers. Every day, we'd dutifully appear for class, and he would show up a few minutes late, looking like he had just spent all night running around in a tizzy. (He had young children, so that was probably an accurate guess.) I remember his frenetic energy - he never seemed to have a proper lesson plan, and he liked to throw in quotes from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell into all of his commentary. I liked the class a lot, despite the lack of structure. And I really enjoyed the reading list - it's what made me start thinking of Los Angeles as more than just miles of concrete and smog. We read Day of the Locust, a novel about the people who aspired to be part of the early movie industry, and afterwards, I devoured the rest of West's writing on my own time.

That was a very long introduction for something that has very little to do with the book! Anyway, so I was feeling forlorn at the beginning of February. I went on a walk in my grimy downtown neighborhood, and the combination of my mood, the weather, and the old buildings reminded me of West's work. His characters are spare... and doomed. His descriptions border on surrealism. Do I like the people in these books? Not at all. They're selfish and mean and stupid. But there's a thread of black humor throughout.

This is definitely not easy reading. While short, I had to pace myself to keep from missing things. But I'm glad I re-read them. It had been too long since I had visited these old friends.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Miss Lonely Hearts by Nathanael West

I had been hearing about Nathanael West for several years but had never been motivated enough to read his books. When I saw “Miss Lonely Hearts” at a bazaar of second-hand items on an esplanade shaded by date palms in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on a Thursday morning, I decided to add it to my collection, thinking that it might be a classic.

That’s as far as it got until our isolation in Long Island, NY, due to the Covid virus pandemic. It was written as an epistolary story, one of my favorite styles as in Guy de Montherlant’s “Les Girls”, but it was off-beat and not really that much of an epistolary novella (a long short story really).

West wrote this book in a style which for me was kind of disjointed, having to do a lot with frustrated readers of a daily newspaper in which he was writing a column and his compassion and at the same time disdain for them.

I believe that the Post-WWII period of writing in the 1950s and 60s (West died in 1940) may have been influenced by his writing, reflecting sexual frustration maybe because of the advancement of women in the workplace and their new lease on freedom or the aimlessness that follows the excitement of war or the threat of annihilation or the diminution of society’s belief in God, increasing mechanization, or dozens of other things.

You get this hollowness in reading American writers such as Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Erskine Caldwell, John Updike and others—all competent, but who leave a reader yearning for a ray of hope or joy but not leaving much for hungry readers.

I may read West’s “Day of the Locust”, which was a companion piece of Lonely Hearts, but probably not, especially during these days of massive death and suffering everywhere.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like all black humor, these works are informed by a serious and intensely troubled view of man's existence -- specifically our contemporary existence where advertising tries to sell something -- a shaving lotion, a film, vitamins -- by molding our ideas of what we should be, physically, emotionally and spiritually. But Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust also contain considerable realism amidst their raucous and hilarious satire, and the two don't sit well beside each other. To give one example, at the beginning of Miss Lonelyhearts, a girl writes to an advice column in a newspaper:

I am sixteen years old now and I don't know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little girl it was not so bad, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose--although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.

There are several letters like this throughout the story which spur much soul-searching by the protagonist, but they are ultimately not the author's real concern, any more than Gulliver amongst the Lilliputans was for Jonathan Swift, and thus the very real and intense empathy generated by the characters' plight is thwarted and left by the roadside.

Apart from this esthetic fork in the road, West's narrative in both works is captivating, and certain metaphors and extended analogies are breathtakingly audacious.

[rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't "really like" reading this book.

It is so very world-weary, its beauty melancholy and even mundane. Miss Lonelyhearts' eponymous character tries to beat the despair of reading people's problems for a living and...sort of, almost, succeeds. In The Day of the Locust, men and women flock to Hollywood seeking The Prize (be it a beautiful woman, fame, or simply an improved quality of life eating tropical fruits under palm trees); complications arise. It's mostly a downer.

But it's not completely a downer, because Nathanael West is so damn funny! Observe:

When he had finished his second cup of scalding coffee, it was too late for him to go to work. But he had nothing to worry about, for Shrike would never fire him. He was too perfect a butt for Shrike's jokes. Once he had tried to get fired by recommending suicide in his column. All that Shrike had said was, 'Remember, please, that your job is to increase the circulation of our paper. Suicide, it is only reasonable to think, must defeat this purpose.'

(Hopefully this excerpt is not only funny to people who are clinically depressed.)

If I had the space, I would quote the entire book. It's that good. West's writing is so perceptive and clever, without being too overt. You have to read it slowly. Every sentence is worthy.

[Sarah Etter · Rating 5 out of 5]

i've always loved a black comedy. and this one always has the ability to make me want to burst out into cackles and cry for three days at the same time.

whenever i meet someone who hasn't read this yet, i'm shocked. it seems like it should be required reading for life.

some of this is hard to take - the plight of miss lonelyhearts and his conflicts with the human condition, misery and religion would be unbearable to read if he had a real name.

miss lonelyhearts isn't a likable man. nothing pretty happens here. but as pathetic and sad as he is, there is value in exploring just how shitty the human condition can be and just how bad things can get.

the way west deftly turns sex, violence and misery on their heads - since they are viewed through the lens of this sort of paralyzed man - isn't just admirable. it's something i notice in books that followed for years after - a strain of blackness that seems to start with this book and then wind through countless other authors.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incisive, captivating, and intriguing, these brief novels from Nathanael West present the terse, hard-boiled quality of serious fiction at the time. The darkness spews in it like black ink as West targets New York and L.A. in each of these two pieces.

In Miss Lonelyhearts a newspaper advice columnist struggles with the weight of sadness in the letters he receives daily—the horrific abuse at home, the loneliness of city life, the deep disconnect humans have, as they seek solutions from an anonymous source. Miss Lonelyhearts, the only name we ever know the protagonist by, becomes more and more affected by the letters and can no longer phone things in—his emotional investment in the lives within these letters prevents him from feeling qualified to even begin advice, much less present a reasonable solution to their authors. Meanwhile, Lonelyhearts engages in some nefarious behavior of his own, engaging in affairs and causing some of the chaos that would make fodder for someone’s letter to Miss Lonelyhearts to begin with.

As Lonelyhearts seeks for answers beyond him, especially through religion, he finds only emptiness in his wake. A really darkly comic thing, short, sweet but maybe a little too brisk to have fully developed.

However, it’s in The Day of the Locust that West’s acerbic critique unfolds, and establishes his voice as a preeminent writer worthy of our attention. Written amidst Hollywood’s golden age, and as West himself was breaking into the business with screenwriting work, this novel pulls up the rug on America’s wicked dream to examine the filth lurking beneath. Full of twisted and desperate people, The Day of the Locust is a twisting narrative of a woman who seeks to climb a social ladder while being pursued relentlessly by seedy and unscrupulous men. As the world spirals downward, sinking into a moral decrepitude of people debasing themselves in service of chasing the American Dream of Hollywood stardom, West’s piercing, biting text exposes the basest elements of our humanity, a humanity beyond moral and simply of survival, lust and desire.

The novel is dark, and darkly disturbing, while having some the bleakest comedy of the time in its pages. In West’s short career, these two novels represent a pinnacle of an American voice that never got to sing full-throated, and one can’t help wonder where his acid-sharp satires wouldn’t have taken us in a post-war era, where black humor found new footing amidst the madcap threat of human extinction at the press of a button by men in uniforms. The satire in West’s novels is so successful because it’s apolitical and rooted in the worst of our human urges, intimately tied to what makes us this particular species in this particular country in this particular era. West’s novels are mirror that reflects blackly back at its viewer, showing what could be, or what we live amongst. With a Hollywood that is as ever invested in its veneer of do-gooders and critically responsible individuals, these novels remind us of the filth and squalor and darkness that underlies it, that feeds it and makes it possible.

[Bob Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two American classics in one book

A car accident took the life of Nathanael West when he was 37 years old, cutting off the career of a most original, talented writer, who might have been one of our venerated 20th century literary heroes if he had lived. These two short novels are perhaps the best of his tragically brief opus. They have to be reviewed separately, even if this book combines both of them.

"God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son !" I'm not puttin' you on, though, MISS LONELYHEARTS has got to be one of the best American novels ever written and it's only 58 pages long. The language is so electric that it reminds you of the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison. The style is so simple that it recalls Richard Brautigan. And the theme is so universal that you'll recall William Faulkner, another Nobelist. This all in the space of a few pages. If West had lived in the 80s or 90s, he would have been an instant wonder of literature. Or maybe he still would have sunk like a stone in the sea of junk. Never mind punditry. If you ever liked amazing tales of dreams, fights, sex, bold symbolic imagery, confusion, and despair, this novel is for you ! Miss Lonelyhearts is an alcoholic man who writes the "lonely hearts" column in a New York newspaper. He wishes to alleviate the pain in the mass of people "out there", but he cannot stop from causing pain to all those around him, nor most of all, to himself. Do not fail to read this book !

"Dream Factory Produces Mostly Nightmares" Every dog must have his day, but that day would be positively industrious compared to those that fill the lives of dronish hangers-on in Hollywood that populate THE DAY OF THE LOCUST. Tilt 1930s America on its side and every loose cannon bounces its way down to Los Angeles in search of X. Most books on Hollywood or the film industry concentrate on glamor, power, and money, not to mention sex and perversions thereof. West's short novel takes a look at all those who didn't realize their dreams, who didn't even know what exactly their dreams were, or who were too stupid, naive, or drunk to do anything about them. Then there are all those who lived off the dreamers, the people for whom a quick buck or a quick encounter were everything. The book ends in total nightmare; no end to the scream. Life without substance is not much of a life. West never stoops so low as to lecture us about "family values". Another powerful novel in a small-size package. Dynamite.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 3 out of 5]

So far I've only read Miss Lonelyhearts.
What an odd little story. Sex and booze and a Christ fixation and a melancholy madness brought on by immersion in the woes of complete strangers. I'm not sure what the point is, except to say that if you set out to fool or poke fun at others, you may find that the joke's on you.

I've satisfied my curiosity, anyway. I don't know that Nathanael West is the author for me. I'll have to try one more just to be sure.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

According to the back cover: "Nathanael West died almost unknown in 1940" - fairly young in a car crash. "Miss Lonelyhearts" is about a newspaper columnist who gets emotionally sucked into the dilemmas of the people who write in to him. A novel of conscience, set in an often conscienceless profession. "The Day of the Locust" is a critique of Hollywood - later made into a Hollywood movie. I'm 'reviewing' his 4 novels here out of my usual alphabetical order that I'm working thru my lit section in b/c I just read this in Lewis Yablonsky's great bk "Robopaths" last nite:

Literary works abound with descriptive appraisals of the condition of "common people," their proclivity for ahuman acts, and their general simmering hostility. One perceptive literary analyst of this genre of the "silent majority" of robopaths was the brilliant novelist, Nathanael West, who revealed some dimensions of the problem. In the late thirties he came to Hollywood and trained his literary camera not on the movie studios or the stars, but on the "common people" who, as West's central character in The Day of the Locust states, "came to California to die." West, through this character, wrote:

"All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. . . . Where else could they go but to California, the land of sunshine and oranges?

"Once there, they discover that sunshine isn't enough. . . . Nothing happens. They don't know what to do with their time. . . . Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. . . . Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and slaved for nothing."

In The Day of the Locust a central character is Tod Hackett, a young painter who is planning a painting called "The burning of Los Angeles." (Interestingly, this artisitic and literary speculation is already a reality.) [Yablonsky's bk was published in 1972 so he's presumably referring to the Watts riots of 1968(?) here] The book ends with the "living dead" masses venting their frustration and hostility in a mad riot of fire that sets off the burning of other cities throughout the country. West, like Moreno, Capek, Huxley, and Orwell, has turned out to be a seer of an incipient apocalypse nurtured by robopathic leaders and followers in contemporary social machine societies.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

As West is considered a "name" writer, thought I'd try this one.

Read Day of the Locust first, which turned out to be a good idea. Liked it a lot for its sense of time and place (1930's L. A.), as well as finding the characters interesting for the most part, although The Cowboy and The Mexican in the final chapters made the ending drag out. Between 3 and 4 stars.

Miss Lonelyhearts, on the other hand, never really engaged me. He seemed a cold, selfish guy; the rest seemed pathetic. Moreover, there wasn't a strong setting of Depression-era New York. By the end, I didn't have an idea of what I'd read for certain, and wasn't much bothered by that. Between 2 and 3 stars.

Now I can say I've read West.

[John Pistelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nathanael West's 1933 novella, Miss Lonelyhearts, has passionate defenders. Harold Bloom declares it his favorite modern novel; in his chapter on it in How to Read and Why, he notes that Flannery O'Connor's own two favorite modern novels, which she saw as akin to each other, were As I Lay Dying and Miss Lonelyhearts. And there is a blurb inside my New Directions edition from Stanley Edgar Hyman calling it "one of the three best American novels of the first half of our century (with The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby)"—Hyman is better known today as Shirley Jackson's husband, and Shirley Jackson and Nathanael West are clearly birds of a feather. I first read the novella in my teens, under orders from the aforementioned Bloom, but was moved to re-read it recently when a friend told me how hard it was to share in the classroom with the trigger warning generation. In his grimly comic indignation at the horror of human existence, West wants to squeeze every trigger in sight.

The very conceit of the novella is a provocation: Miss Lonelyhearts (a young male writer who is never referred to by any other name, not even by the impersonal narrator) is the advice columnist for the New York Post-Dispatch. He is tormented by the letters he receives (real letters that West actually appropriated from a newspaper job), to whose anguish there is really no answer. Take this one from a sixteen-year-old girl without a nose:

What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didnt do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesnt know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I dont believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?

This is hard to read because you have to receive it both as unutterably sad and also as horribly funny. There are sensibilities for which this kind of thing can never be funny, but mine is not one of them. The deadpan of the final question, the somewhat cynical naïveté of "Even if I did do some bad things," the slightly ludicrous extremity of the overall situation—these add up to a bleak laughter at the nature of things; I do not think it is a cruel laughter, though, it is more akin to the self-mortifying laughter in Swift or Beckett—or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O'Connor—at the common plight in which we are all complicit. When West gets around to depicting actually cruel laughter, as when Miss Lonelyheart's friends in the speakeasy are trading rape jokes even as they metafictionally mock the '30s vogue for "hard boiled" writing, the narrator informs us of such cruelty's etiology:

Miss Lonelyhearts stopped listening. His friends would go on telling these stories until they were too drunk to talk. They were aware of their childishness, but did not know how else to revenge themselves. At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.

Miss Lonelyheart's co-worker Shrike—named for a predatory "butcher bird"—is the agent of unbelief. He tortures Miss Lonelyhearts by mocking and parodying every escape route from loneliness, despair, and violence. His systematically parodies religious belief, devotion to nature, love of art, and even the easier escapes of drugs and alcohol. The spirit of cynicism and sarcasm, he leaves no potentially redemptive discourse unmocked; he refutes nothing, but leaves every argument and way of life looking tawdry and ridiculous (I would be surprised if no critic has compared him to such canonically suspicious hermeneutists as Lacan, Foucault, Bourdieu, etc.).

Miss Lonelyhearts, for his part, is described this way:

Although his cheap clothes had too much style, he still looked like the son of a Baptist minister. A beard would become him, would accent his Old–Testament look. But even without a beard no one could fail to recognize the New England puritan. His forehead was high and narrow. His nose was long and fleshless. His bony chin was shaped and cleft like a hoof.

He is, in other words, a descendant of all those compromised goodmen and ministers in Hawthorne who wanted to be holy but in whose flesh the thorns of temptation and guilt left bloody lacerations. He has a Christ complex—and a statue of Christ's body nailed to the wall in his one-room lodging, along with his copy of The Brothers Karamazov with a bookmark in the Father Zossima chapter. Shrike preys upon this: "He was thinking of how Shrike had accelerated his sickness by teaching him to handle his one escape, Christ, with a thick glove of words." In search of some relief, Miss Lonelyhearts pursues love, first with his sometime girlfriend Betty and then with one of his letter-writers, a woman seemingly desperate for sex because she is "married to a cripple." The novella's swiftly narrated sequence of horrible incidents, all with ironically blasé chapter headings ("Miss Lonelyhearts Pays a Visit," "Miss Lonelyhearts Has a Religious Experience"), demonstrate the impossibility of religious belief in the modern world and the Ecclesiastes emptiness of a world without faith. Loveless sex, with occasional beatings, and a climax in delirium and violence, are all that Shrike's world has to offer. The novella is immensely impressive, and its pared-down imagistic prose and starkly allegorical energy seem to set a standard for modern American writing. The mix of humor and horror is almost unavailable to the literary class today, lost as we are in smug neo-Victoriana (the '30s may well have been too hard-boiled, but we are weakly poached in our own self-righteous tears).

Still—and maybe I am just a philistine—I prefer West's longer 1939 novel of Hollywood, The Day of the Locust, to Miss Lonelyhearts. The later novel far more successfully dramatizes the earlier novella's themes, demonstrating them through character and incident rather than asserting them; also, the proto-postmodern space of Hollywood, which is the occasion for so much of West's brilliant descriptive writing, is a superbly persuasive "objective correlative" (I am feeling old-fashioned today) for the spiritual emptiness of modern life. The novel's protagonist is Tod Hackett, an aspiring artist and Yale graduate who has been brought west to be a set designer. In L.A., he becomes infatuated with his neighbor, Faye Greener, a beautiful young wannabe actress whose dying father, a brilliant Dickensian grotesque, is an old vaudevillian who never stops the act. For her part, Faye rejects Tod because he has no money and no prospects. She takes up instead with a midwestern transplant named Homer Simpson (yes, that's where Matt Groening came by the name), a man of no experience in flight from his urges and desires. The novel is again episodic, a series of fairly horrible scenes (a vividly described cockfight, Tod's rape-like pursuit of Faye, Faye's own abusive torment of the naif Homer, etc.), but the main action, witnessed by the passive Tod, is Homer's destruction by the corrupt world to which Faye has introduced him. Throughout, Tod is planning his great painting, The Burning of Los Angeles—and the novel's famously spectacular climax, at an infernal film premiere, spiritually if not literally makes good on the painting's title. West's major theme seems to be the universal ubiquity of predation, its necessity in the human psychic economy. Here is how Tod thinks of Faye:

If he only had the courage to throw himself on her. Nothing less violent than rape would do. The sensation he felt was like that he got when holding an egg in his hand. Not that she was fragile or even seemed fragile. It wasn't that. It was her completeness, her egglike self-sufficiency, that made him want to crush her.

And here is how Faye thinks of Homer:

His servility was like that of a cringing, clumsy dog, who is always anticipating a blow, welcoming it even, and in a way that makes overwhelming the desire to strike him. His generosity was still more irritating. It was so helpless and unselfish that it made her feel mean and cruel, no matter how hard she tried to be kind.

This is impressively penetrating psychology, but West really outdoes himself in his descriptions of Hollywood, a kind of artificial paradise where viciously bored Americans have "come to die." In one bravura chapter, Tod seeks Faye throughout a sequence of film sets, moving through all the adjacent faked epochs they represent, until a recreation of Waterloo ends in real destruction when the set collapses. The scenic descriptions in the opening chapter sound this theme:

He reached the end of Vine Street and began the climb into Pinyon Canyon. Night had started to fall.

The edges of the trees burned with a pale violet light and their centers gradually turned from deep purple to black. The same violet piping, like a Neon tube, outlined the tops of the ugly, hump-backed hills and they were almost beautiful.

But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon.

When he noticed that they were all of plaster, lath and paper, he was charitable and blamed their shape on the materials used. Steel, stone and brick curb a builder's fancy a little, forcing him to distribute his stresses and weights and to keep his corners plumb, but plaster and paper know no law, not even that of gravity.

On the corner of La Huerta Road was a miniature Rhine castle with tarpaper turrets pierced for archers. Next to it was a little highly colored shack with domes and minarets out of the Arabian Nights. Again he was charitable. Both houses were comic, but he didn't laugh. Their desire to startle was so eager and guileless.

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

This is satire, but more than satire: it is also sympathy. Our "need" has brought us to such a pass as the creation of Hollywood. Made of paper, it will easily burn, but the artist—Tod, West—is there to mark its passing, even if there is no other agency of redemption.

[August Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

While Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust are totally individual novels (and are approached separately below), they really work here as dueling scions of American emptiness and decay in the East and West, respectively. Nathanael West is a manufacturer of hot bile, reflecting our vain and disgusting culture back at us.

Miss Lonelyhearts, which is much more stylistically experimental, gives us sprawling pages of broken lives in the letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives for the advice column he authors for a pulpy New York City paper. Most of the letters are, "profoundly humble pleas for spiritual and moral advice" and "inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering," (p 32). There is a teenage girl who is mercilessly ridiculed and makes her parents cry for being born without a nose, a girl whose blind and deaf sister who is molested by a stranger while playing outside, and a woman abused and taunted by a husband who will hide out in their bedroom for hours in his own filth simply to burst out and frighten her. There is the sadistic, morally-bankrupt Shrike, one of the most infamously interesting antagonists. He is a hedonistic antithesis to Miss Lonelyhearts' search for some sort of existential meaning. Shrike is a literal anti-Christ character, mocking Miss Lonelyhearts' Christianity and using him as the punchline of his religious jokes. Miss Lonelyhearts becomes a Christ stand-in, drunkenly stumbling around New York City to cure the ails of those who write to him and, ultimately, (spoiler alert) seems to die in a Christ-like martyrdom. "God had sent [the man] so that Miss Lonelyhearts could perform a miracle... He would embrace the cripple and the cripple would be made whole again even as he, a spiritual cripple, had been made whole," (p 57).

The Day of the Locust, which has become a canonized LA novel, similarly skewers the inhumane, empty commodification of Hollywood and entertainment ("Love is like a vending machine, eh? ... You insert a coin and press home the lever," [p 72]). There are a lot of narrative threads embedded in this taut novel, but in many ways it's the story of two counterbalancing men (Homer Simpson and Tod Hackett) who both are destroyed in their own way by Hollywood. They're consumed with lust for Faye Greener, a young upstart actress who seems to symbolize sexual desire and empty lust. Tod, a low-level set designer for a film studio who came to Hollywood to build a career in entertainment, and Homer, a hotel bookkeeper and California transplant who moved there on orders from his doctor to recover from an illness, couldn't be more unaligned. They're both bound together by their lust for Faye as their experience in California falls far short of their dreams of health and prosperity. Instead, they find themselves in the doldrums of boredom, seeking out cheap and grotesque thrills with booze and drugs and cock fights.

Tod and Homer are both swept up in the epic climactic mob scene at a movie premiere, which finds thousands of nascent Californians and film fans transformed into a murderous mob made up of stomach-churning perversion. Homer is in a total daze, broken and out of touch with reality as he stomps a young boy (to death, it seems) for throwing a rock at his face, while Tod is trampled and dragged along before he is left behind by the mob, broken and bloodied, but not before he has witnessed multiple men molest a young girl whom he couldn't maneuver through the chaos to save.

The "American Dream" was fresh in our cultural lexicon and national ethos in the 1930s, but West already was recognizing how fickle and devoid of meaning it is. "Once [in California], they discover that sunshine isn't enough... Nothing happens. They don't know what to do with their time. They haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure," (p 177-178). He recognizes a deep sadness and the excess that is used to try and fill the void. He notices an actor who has particular wrinkles, "plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he could never express anything either subtlety or exactly. They wouldn't permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree," (p 119).

[Jeffrey Bumiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

These two stories are like a dark cloud of doom and gloom. Uncomfortable, vivid, sometimes funny, and brilliant.

[Ivva Tadiashvili · Rating 4 out of 5]

მის მარტოსული ძაან საოცარი რამეა. კალიის დღეც კარგი იყო მაგრამ მის მარტოსული ძალიან ძალიან მომეწონა

[Eileen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book out years ago at The Book Thing in Baltimore because I thought the cover looked charming. I still see it all the time in indie bookstores. If you look at its Goodreads reviews, you'll see that they are overwhelmingly positive; Nathanael West definitely has a bit of a cult following. BUT if you look a little closer, you'll realize that most of these 4- and 5-star reviews are made by intellectual-looking white men. You know the type. I think this says a lot about what sort of novel(la)s Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust are.

Miss Lonelyhearts
I honestly don't remember much of this. Read most of it in ten-minute increments right before I went to bed, the usual deal. It was strange but not particularly memorable. I do recall loathing most of the characters. The concept is interesting: "Miss Lonelyhearts" writes an advice column for the New York Post-Dispatch. The letters he receives are often genuinely tragic, but the fact that they are sent to a faceless and facetious advice-giver renders them caricatures rather than real, affecting pleas. However, I found West's execution a little heavy-handed; he's a clever writer, but none of his characters -- not even Miss Lonelyhearts -- feel convincing.

The Day of the Locust
This is just a gross book. First off, I am so tired of reading Fitzgerald-esque novels about poor young men who are Deep and Discerning and Good People at heart, but are also kind of horrible bums because they're down on their luck, the world is a horrible and cruel place, they are manipulated by callous women, etc. etc. Second, the story is filled with rapey scenes and racist, sexist rhetoric. On several occasions, our ~relatable~ protagonist Tod Hackett thinks things like, "If only he had the courage to wait for [Faye] some night and hit her with a bottle and rape her" (174). Faye, of course, is the femme fatale who Tod later concludes is just a plain "whore" -- platinum blonde and maximally devious and ALWAYS pictured through a sexualized male gaze and somehow pure and profane at the same time. There are also a bunch of not-so-subtle racial jabs, mostly in the form of conversational remarks but also in the form of Miguel, the novel's only non-white character who conveniently takes on the mantle of lustful-sexual-predator-who-lacks-the-restraint-that-our-good-white-people-have. If you can't tell, I'm SO not into it.

[Beth Cato · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a book about horrible people being horrible to each other.

These two novels (more like novellas by modern standards) are considered classics. Miss Lonelyhearts was made into multiple movies and even an opera; Day of the Locust was made into a movie and was later dubbed one of the best books of the 20th century. That's a sad statement about the century. In any case, the movie versions must have radically changed elements from the books, as they both feature bleak tones and existential dilemmas and persistent sex, along with cruel characters who can't keep their pants on.

Miss Lonelyhearts follows the titular Miss Lonelyhearts, a man who writes answers for an advice column. He mocks the people who come to him for help, while he's an even sadder sap who hangs out with men who discuss why women should be gang raped.

The Day of the Locust takes place in 1930s Hollywood, and I was able to get some research notes out of that--thank goodness, this thing wasn't a total waste of time! Tod is a painter for a studio, but very little of the story is on actual Hollywood. Instead, Tod obsesses over a neighbor women, Faye, and repeatedly daydreams about raping her. I am not exaggerating. To quote page 107: "Nothing less than violent rape would do." Tod even gets drunk and shows up at the funeral for Faye's father, where he then tries to rape her. (Note: don't be Tod.) And yet he keeps getting turned down by her, and calls her a slut a few times, too.

Really, these two novels remind of when I read slush for a magazine, and how so many stories were of men taking revenge on shrewish women. I rejected those stories. I reject these two novels/novellas, too. I enjoy a good anti-hero. I don't mind dark stories. But these are pretentious and obnoxious. There are female main characters in both, but all of them are regarded as sexual objects to be pinched, humped, or raped. They serve no other purpose.

I will not subject myself to any more of West's works.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I rebelled and struggled against reading these two stories, and had to force myself to press on nearly all the way through. In the end I found some redemption/value, but very little of the experience was anything I'd call enjoyable.

These stories are populated, by bitter, disenfranchised men who fantasize about rape as an appropriate corrective to "uppity" women. They are certainly not the source of their own ugliness -- all are struggling in a Depression-era world -- but still, the first scene in which a group of men in a bar approvingly discuss a gang rape I wanted to throw this book across the room. This simmering hostility against women is a line that is played with throughout both stories.

Somehow, it gets even more repulsive, but then, Oh! The mob scene at the end of The Day of the Locust! It's just as brutal as the rest of it, but such an effective metaphor for everything that's gone before that it shines. Pretty much the only thing that kept me from a one or two star rating. But would I recommend this book to get to that scene? Doubtful. It would have to be a highly specific set of circumstances. I mean, is it an accurate depiction of a slice of humanity in human history? It certainly feels true. Still not fun to read.

[RandomAnthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed "The Day of the Locusts." Any book that features a drunk dwarf in the first ten pages is ok by me. His clean, realistic style, crossing into deep psychological insight, makes me wonder what else Mr. West would have written had he not bit the bullet so early.

"Miss Lonelyhearts" didn't do as much for me, I must admit. Maybe I should read it again. Anyway, add Mr. West to the list of "why isn't this guy more popular?" authors. Mr. West, meet Mr. Sherwood Anderson.

[Croix · Rating 5 out of 5]

Miss Lonelyhearts: 5/5
The Day of the Locust: 4/5