Very unhappy with this book. It was a distorted creation of characters and circumstances to spell as much hopelessness, dysfunction and misery as possible. It reminded me of a demented comic book more than meaningful literature. While there are loose associations to greed, crime, cruelty and prejudice, it was so overdone and simplistic it was meaningless to me. Some reviews referred to its a parody or caricature. In my view this was giving it too much credit for a bitter distortion to invoke hopelessness.
( )

Nathanael West is the greatest American writer most Americans have never read. "Miss Lonelyhearts" (1933) and "Day of the Locust" (1939) are two of the finest pieces of short fiction produced. This "complete collection" contains these as well as the other two novellas "The Dream Life of Balso Snell" (1931) and "A Cool Million" (1936). West and his wife Eileen died in a car crash in 1940 -- West was only 37 years old. I first read "Miss Lonelyhearts" about 25 years ago, and it has stayed with me all these years. ( )

“Moooompitcher yaaaah. Oh I never hoped to know the passion, the sensuality hidden within you – yes, yes. Drag me down into the mire, drag. Yes! And with your hair the lust from my eyes brush. Yes … Yes … Ooh! Ah!” (p. 61).


‘Nough said (or cited) about The Dream Life of Balso Snell, the first of four short novels in Nathanael West’s Complete Works. West was young at this point, just starting out, and quite enamored of words – or at least of the sound of them – not to mention of the procreative act. But hey, who isn’t – or wasn’t – at that age? (West was twenty-eight when, in 1931, this novel was published in a limited edition.)


Miss Lonelyhearts is a whole ‘nother story.


Upon reading the second letter addressed to the columnist of The New York Post-Dispatch – a columnist who calls himself ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ and who dispenses advice and comfort to tortured readers’ souls – I was suddenly reminded of the ever-so-poignant conclusion of Herman Melville’s brilliant novella, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”


Perhaps the following citation (from Miss Lonelyhearts to his sometimes-girlfriend, Betty) will shed some light on my spontaneous – and possibly erroneous – comparison of the two stories: “‘Let’s start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator’” (p. 106).


Both the plot and the language of Miss Lonelyhearts flow back and forth rather seamlessly between surrealistic and hyper-realistic – and then the novel ends on a note that is a combination of both. This little story is definitely not for those readers who are prone to seasickness or vertigo!


Next up is A Cool Million. I’m frankly not able to devise a better descriptor for this novel than ‘weird.’ Published at the exact midpoint (1934) of the Great Depression, it is, I suppose, an attempt to turn the Horatio Alger myth on its head. And while I’m quite sympathetic to any writer who would attempt to explode that myth, I’m not altogether certain that Nathanael West’s hyperbolic prose achieves his desired end.


From the mouth of Shagpoke Whipple, former President of the United States (sic!), we have the following on p. 150: “‘America,’ he said with great seriousness, ‘is the land of opportunity. She takes care of the honest and industrious and never fails them as long as they are both. This is not a matter of opinion, it is one of faith. On the day that Americans stops believing it, on that day will America be lost.’”


Couple the above with the following exchange on p. 214 between Lemuel Pitkin, the ‘hero’ of our story, and his would-be childhood sweetheart, Betty Prail, whose own course through life proves to be almost as disastrous as Lemuel’s: “‘Well,’ interrupted Lem, a little ashamed of having submitted that he was discouraged. ‘I left Ottsville to make my fortune and so far I’ve been to jail twice and lost all my teeth and one eye.’


‘To make an omelette you have to break eggs,’ said Betty. ‘When you’ve lost both eyes, you can talk.’”


And finally, the only novel of Nathanael West I’d previously read – and the one that drew me to this collection: The Day of the Locust….


For the “best of West,” please consider the following opening paragraph – but with my recommendation that you read the entire first chapter to get a better feel for what this author can do when he’s on target: “Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office. The groan of leather mingled with the jangle of iron and over all beat the tattoo of a thousand hooves. He hurried to the window.”


The setting for this first paragraph is not a war zone or a racetrack. It’s Hollywood. And West exposes Hollywood for what it was and is. The picture is not pretty.


I wish I could give Nathanael West more than three stars. Unfortunately, I can’t. Had he lived longer, he might’ve become a more disciplined writer. He didn’t. He died at the age of 37.


RRB
08/30/14
Brooklyn, NY
( )

732. The Complete Works of Nathanael West: The Dream Life of Balso Snell; Miss Lonelyhearts; A Cool Million; The Day of the Locust (read 5 May 1963) This book includes the listed novels. It is my understanding that these are the only novels West wrote. I was not moved to write any post-reading thought on them, even though they were read at a time when I wrote about my reading if it moved me sufficiently. . ( )

West wrote his scathing novels in the '30s. Looking back at that time it was a period of stress for many people. West's novels reflect the times, not white washing them but as they were. Like a true novelist he reflects humankind in its grimmer aspects. We cannot wish that his view be different from what it is. We can only hope a similar writer comes to give a true picture of the past four years ( )