Reviews for Miss Lonelyhearts

The average rating for Miss Lonelyhearts based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-12 00:00:00 Mandy Shaner This is a great little novel, so compelling and disturbing that I have trouble writing about it. It is unique in its elliptical development, its harsh realism verging on nightmare, and its emotional viciousness. I have read it three times, at least, and each time I have a slightly different reaction to it. The novel's main character is an advice columnist--hence the name "Miss Lonelyhearts"--who is going insane under the weight of his disordered life and the burden of the letters from desperate souls, piled on his desk every morning, On the surface it is a stark condemnation of the American Dream more disturbing than Fitzgerald or Steinbeck, made brutal by its hard-boiled prose, and brought close to apocalypse by a hero obsessed with Christ's wounds and the necessity of blood sacrifice. But what I have said--strange as it is--normalizes Miss Lonelyhearts too much, for Nathanael West's book is also blackly funny in a way that only a book steeped in European cynicism and iconoclasm could be. In spite of its superficial similarities, it is a world--I almost said an ocean--away from the earnestness of the Great American Novel. It reminds me more of Georg Grosz and Nicolai Gogol than of The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath. Nathan Weinstein--Nathanael West was his nom de plume--was born into an upper middle class family of Russian secular Jews who lived on the Upper West Side. He had little interest in his father's construction business and instead read precociously, devouring Shakespeare and Dickens, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy--all by the age of ten. He dropped out of high school, forged his way into Tufts; dropped out of Tufts, forged his way into Brown, where he continued to study little and read much. He had little patience for the staples of American fiction, favoring a literary diet of French surrealism and British decadence, enlivened with an occasional cup of Christian mysticism. After graduating university, Weinstein moved to Paris, began dressing like a dandy, and changed his name to West. He completed the novel he had been working on fitfully through college: The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a deliberately offensive piece of surreal near-obscenity, filled with Freudian cliches and literary parody, which takes place entirely within the body of the Trojan Horse. It is helpful to see Miss Lonelyhearts as a continuation of the artistic aims of Balso Snell. Its jarring transitions, its disturbing juxtapositions of mystical visions with scatological and sexual themes is all part of a plot to assault the sensibilities of the reader and alienate him from the text of the work itself. This alienation in turn may lead him to question his assumptions about literature and life (although I'm not convinced West cares one way or the other if he does so). It's funny though. Throughout all of the novel's sordid scenes, throughout its hero's dark comic fumblings and messianic delusions, that pile of letters on his desk'surrounded they though may be by crippling ironies'still move the reader. We cannot forget--anymore than he can forget'the abject miseries of those lost souls who pour out the details of their hopeless lives in the letters they addressed to "Dear Miss Lonelyhearts." I will with end this review with one of those haunting letters. Dear Miss Lonelyhearts-- I am sixteen years old now and I dont 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 because I got used to the kids on the block makeing fun of me, 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. I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me. 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? Sincerely yours, Desperate

Review # 2 was written on 2017-03-05 00:00:00 Angel Castillo Choosing Your Poison A story of relentless, universal, even cosmic failure. Every character is a failure: as writer, poet, husband, wife, journalist, and most importantly, follower of Jesus Christ. All are "stamped with the dough of suffering," demonstrate a sort of extreme frustration-neurosis, and are demoralised. Failure provokes cruelty and hatefulness: men dislike each other; men despise women, and gay men only slightly less; women manipulate men when they can; they ignore them when they can't. The world is essentially mad: "You are plunging into a world of misery and suffering, peopled by creatures who are strangers to everything but disease and policemen. Harried by one, they are hurried by the other..." The letters-to-the-editor, largely illiterate, describing the personal misery and failures of the public at large pour on to the desk of the advice columnist, Miss Lonelyhearts. He often feels compelled to recommend suicide as the only effective remedy for the pain that is recounted to him. And not just to reduce their pain: "Christ may be the answer," he says, "but if he did not want to get sick he had to stay away from this Christ business." Christ had become "merely decorative" not only in the protagonist's shabby room, where the human figure had been removed from his cross, but also in society at large. Violence by the stronger against the weaker is normal and expected. The slightest mis-step or ill-considered phrase results in rage and instant retaliation. Prohibition, the Great Experiment, is in force but unenforced; alcohol is the universal drug of choice to dull the tedium of life. Oblivion is the normal state of being for the protagonist. Social contracts from marriage to employment are meaningless formalities and breached in spirit if not in fact. The daily headlines testify to the general barbarity of existence. Racism and suspicion - of blacks, Jews, foreigners - is typical in everyday encounters. What are the alternatives? Back to the land is a boor. Escape to the South Seas is a worn-out cliche. Hedonism is too expensive. Art is an illusion. Treating the world as a joke is generally what the world does but Miss Lonelyhearts simply can't do that. Shrike, his editor, suggests the only available path, "The church is our only hope, the First Church of Christ Dentist, where He is worshiped as Preventer of Decay." One has to remind oneself repeatedly while reading it that Miss Lonelyhearts was written in 1933. Nothing about it is dated. It anticipates the culture of sex, drugs, social disintegration and national narcissism that was only temporarily interrupted by WWII but that re-emerged with force in the 1960's and thereafter. Miss Lonelyhearts could easily be mistaken for the novelistic manifesto of existentialism. 'Suicide is always a live option' is a theme presented persistently a decade before Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, and two decades before its translation hit New York City. That West was able to detect the more fundamental deterioration occurring below the more apparent economic ills of the Great Depression is remarkable. His perception is poetic: "Americans have dissipated their radical energy in an orgy of stone breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians. And they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them." And not even if Christ gets back on his cross does it make any difference to the fate of anyone involved.