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Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust

by Nathanael West

3.92 · Rating Details · 8,100 Ratings · 474 Reviews

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 ...more

Paperback, 185 pages

Published June 1st 1969 by New Directions Publishing Corporation (NY) (first published 1939)

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Mar 29, 2013 Steve rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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 ver 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.
...more

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Mar 09, 2009 Fabian rated it really liked it

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 the climax... the antihero's fate is ...more

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Mar 10, 2008 Tosh rated it it was amazing

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!

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Jun 25, 2015 Edward rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: own, north-america, fiction, 4-star

--The Day of the Locust
--Miss Lonelyhearts

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Sep 30, 2015 Amanda NEVER MANDY rated it liked it

Shelves: 2015

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 perc ...more

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Jul 14, 2009 Jimmy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction

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 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.

...more

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Aug 04, 2007 Lucas rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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 dis ...more

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Feb 10, 2009 Jennifer rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2009

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 ha ...more

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May 07, 2010 rachel rated it liked it

Shelves: 2010, own, this-is-america

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 comple ...more

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Apr 20, 2009 Josh rated it it was amazing

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 descri ...more

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Jun 03, 2013 Bruce rated it liked it

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 ...more

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Apr 26, 2012 Jeanette "Astute Crabbist" rated it liked it

Shelves: all-fiction, just-plain-bizarre

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.

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Mar 22, 2011 gaby rated it it was amazing

Shelves: los-angeles

"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 "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. ...more

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Jan 12, 2014 Jennifer rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction, classics, bookslut-100-books, owned

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 ...more

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Feb 26, 2017 John rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: library_books

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 ...more

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Jun 09, 2011 Sarah Etter rated it it was amazing

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 ...more

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Mar 22, 2008 RandomAnthony rated it liked it

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.

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Mar 07, 2008 tENTATIVELY, cONVENIENCE rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literature

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 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 Yablosky'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. ...more

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May 30, 2012 Juan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Miss Lonelyhearts is Dostoevskiana at its best. Also reminiscent of The Stranger and Hunger, both heirs to Dostoevsky's aimless, misanthropic but morally conflicted by misery, properly modern men of which the underground man, from Notes from Underground, is the true original. Great powerful little book.

Day of the Locust is a classic California novel full of wonderful little surprises, not the least of which is a supremely repressed, awkward character named Homer Simpson. Others include: cock fig ...more

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Jun 19, 2013 Will rated it did not like it · review of another edition

It's possible to write compelling fiction revolving around despicable characters in hopeless situations. Authors who do so successfully allegorize the morally bankrupt, unlikable world in the lives of their characters, with a healthy dose of humor and cynicism. Nabokov, most famously, has done it, Franzen has done it successfully, Conrad has, Faber has, Wells Tower has, and Shteyngart has made a career of making light of the genre. But there's a thin line between writing sly commentary on our ho ...more

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Dec 15, 2007 Saxon rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: you.

Well, I have to say that I am sorely disappointed that I have to part with these two novellas. I feel like I am going through a bad breakup. Fitting? Perhaps. I have a professor/novelist friend from Denmark who considers books like lovers. If you are reading a book the first question he will ask you is, "So...was it a good lover? did it make you breakfast in the morning and rub your back or did it leave a note and take your money out of your wallet?" West was good. real good. taught me a few thi ...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Ryan Williams rated it it was amazing

West sometimes gets lumped along with his contemporary John Steinbeck - two writers of the Great Depression. But West had the more original view of America, and expressed it with an acidic clarity. He saw, as few others could, that hysteria was the price of the American dream. When the crowd in The Day of the Locust turns violent, it's cathartic for West's entire oeuvre.

An original voice that died too young.

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Apr 27, 2016 John Pistelli rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, twentieth-century, short-stories

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 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. ...more

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Mar 13, 2017 Wyckliffe Howland rated it liked it

I just read Miss Lonelyhearts. What a strange, dark book. It has a fairly fast pace but is also brooding and introspective. The main character is depressed and desperate. He treats women as though they were abstract concepts and not human beings. His choices are poorly thought out, and often increase his dilemmas. He is obsessed with Christ as a path out of suffering. There is a lot of sarcasm and social commentary in this book, which was copyrighted in 1933. I will be reading some critical revi ...more

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Sep 17, 2016 Bbrown rated it liked it

“[O]n most days he received more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife.”

This sentence appears on the very first page of Miss Lonelyhearts, and I don’t know about you, but for me it’s the worst line I’ve read in a published book in a long time. After reading it, I sat contemplating it for more time than the line probably deserves: was it intentionally terrible, to show that the narrator, working as an advice columnist, is a ta “[O]n most days he received more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife.”

This sentence appears on the very first page of Miss Lonelyhearts, and I don’t know about you, but for me it’s the worst line I’ve read in a published book in a long time. After reading it, I sat contemplating it for more time than the line probably deserves: was it intentionally terrible, to show that the narrator, working as an advice columnist, is a talentless writer? Or is it just plain terrible? The text doesn’t give much support for the former theory, as the narrator’s coworkers make fun of his (since crumbled) Christian worldview and not his complete lack of talent. I’m left to conclude that West just opened his most famous story with a stinker. Luckily, the writing in the rest of these two novellas is serviceable, if unimpressive.

Miss Lonelyhearts, the story of a man having a crisis of faith and then a mental breakdown after coming face-to-face with the horrors and human suffering of the Big Apple, felt rather by-the-numbers for me. The letters of urban tragedies that the narrator reads are West going after the lowest-hanging fruit of emotion, terrible things happening to innocent people. Of course you react to it, just as you would react to a video of someone killing a puppy, but it takes no skill as a writer to engender that effect. The story spells out the arc that its main character has undergone at the half-way mark of the story, and the rest of the book is the narrator experiencing an artificial recovery and then meeting what is presumably a predictably tragic end. Really, nothing from beginning to end of this story surprised me, besides how bad that line was on the first page.

The Day of the Locust is better in that it feels less tired and predictable, though West accomplishes this by sacrificing the form of a tight, closed narrative for a more rambling one. Background reading on West confirms what you probably already suspected while reading The Day of the Locust, that it’s a story of fictionalized characters and events based on West’s own experiences in Hollywood. A segment where Tod wanders a Hollywood back lot especially feels as though it’s a narrative collage of things West experienced himself. That this story is West communicating his experiences makes the characters feel more organic – there’s nothing nearly so on-the-nose as the skewering editor Shrike – but even with these characters being based on real people, West’s story falls far from stellar. Faye reminded me of a cut-rate Holly Golightly, with West’s writing a shadow of Capote’s. The character of Homer Simpson, that proves in many ways to be the heart of the story, is undercut by West initially depicting him in a positive but nevertheless dehumanizing way. The ending resolves little, and what little it can be said to have resolved it resolves ambiguously. Overall, better than Miss Lonelyhearts, but if it didn’t depict Los Angeles and Hollywood during a period when such depictions were rare then I would have some trouble understanding why so many think of it as an important addition to American literature.

This collection containing both works was useful in showing some of the themes that West revisits: casual cruelty inflicted for entertainment, unconsummated sexual desires, thoughts of rape, mental breakdown, the corruption brought on by modern urban life, etc. It also was useful in showing me that Miss Lonelyhearts wasn’t a fluke: I’m just not a big fan of Nathanael West. ...more

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Mar 01, 2017 Alex rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Some neat imagery but overall terrible.

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Jul 16, 2009 Kevin rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction

Locust: 1 star. Lonelyhearts: 2 stars.

Locust: One of the rape-iest books I've ever read, as it features an assortment of male character preoccupied with a sex worker named Faye, who is as alluring to them as she is unattainable. The main male character, Tod, considers rape a viable option at multiple points in the book, begins to plan it, and actually seems to act on it, though he's unsuccessful. His lust is convincing, but not compelling. A leading louse is fine enough if done well. Here it is Locust: 1 star. Lonelyhearts: 2 stars.

Locust: One of the rape-iest books I've ever read, as it features an assortment of male character preoccupied with a sex worker named Faye, who is as alluring to them as she is unattainable. The main male character, Tod, considers rape a viable option at multiple points in the book, begins to plan it, and actually seems to act on it, though he's unsuccessful. His lust is convincing, but not compelling. A leading louse is fine enough if done well. Here it is not. (I think Bright Lights, Big City is loads more interesting and entertaining, but still not a great book.) The writing is hard-boiled, and the madcap shenanigans (drinking, fighting, brawling) are not connected to anything in an interesting way. The back cover asserts than many critics consider this one of the best novels ever written about Hollywood. Bullshit. Perhaps Faye is meant to epitomize the illusion of the appeal of celebrity and the book is a parable, to which I say that it could have been done much, much better even for the time it was published. If this had been any longer than a novella, I would have quit.

Lonelyhearts: A much more interesting conceit and execution. Told in a series of vignettes, a male advice columnist who goes by Miss Lonelyhearts advises/crumbles under the weight of some really hard-luck cases and his own unsatisfying relationships. The parable of an advise columnist being unable to deal with some of life's hardship, and hardship as entertainment, are great ideas for exploration, and Miss Lonelyhearts is endearing enough just for the sadness and hopelessness he feels for these people. West's writing contrasted with the lowered diction of the letters themselves highlights one of the central issues--that some folks are and will always be ill-equipped at saving themselves. This novella has a lot of the same misogyny as Locust, but with a much bigger idea and more interesting execution to dilute it. I found Lonelyhearts to be palatable, even lovely at times, but I don't know that I'd recommend it. For something with a similar voice and emotional journey, I'd rather read Pyncheon's The Crying of Lot 49. ...more

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Nov 05, 2014 Sterlingcindysu rated it liked it

Shelves: 1001

Time for a little classic. I just don't get it, usually these classics are the ones that I don't finish, or muddle through just because they're short. Does depressing and sad always equal classic?

This is a set of 2 short stories written in 1933, so during the depression and also prohibition. The first is how a "Miss Lonelyhearts" is driven crazy from not being able to help those who ask. They have Real Problems, not like the bridezilla angst letters of today. When he (yes, it's a he) offers up ...more

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Mar 02, 2008 Adam rated it really liked it

Easily two of the bleakest classic American novels I have ever read, nice & tidy in one short book.

"Miss Lonelyhearts" is the tale of a man who takes the job of advice columnist for a NY newspaper-- originally on a lark, but as he sees that his readers' problems are real and horrifying, he tries to find different ways to cope. Drink & sex abound. So do comparisons to Jesus. The book reads, at times, like a parable & a poem. Touching and horrifying.

"The Day of the Locust" paints a mor ...more

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Aug 13, 2007 Peggy rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: people who think that misery, while miserable, is also kinda funny

This two novella volume starts with Miss Lonelyhearts, and that's what I started with as well. Not really knowing anything about the novella going in, I was misled by the goofy title into thinking that I was in for a slightly wacky and fun time. This was not even remotely the case. Let me just say now that Miss Lonelyhearts is not for anyone who is even vaguely suicidal or depressed. There's a lot of seediness and squalor and West describes these situations unflinchingly. I often forget how much ...more

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About Nathanael West

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 New York, 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 ...more

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“He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven.” — 30 likes

“He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it.” — 15 likes

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