Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) by Nathanael West

Book Review

Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) 

by Nathanael West

  It occurs to me that in the course of reading the whole list of 1001 Books there were moments when I was rushed.  Recently I've been revisiting books I've already read- this one was picked for my book club, so I went back and listened to the Audiobook again- which is what I actually did back in 2018, so that I've now listened to the same Audiobook twice.   

    Trying to pin down the exact point where American Literature becomes "modern" is an interesting game.  First, of course, you need to pin down your definition of modern as it pertains to American Literature , then you can make your argument, but Nathanael West is close to the beginning.  Miss Lonelyhearts which is probably the classic work of "expressionist" literature in the American Canon, is associated with an early/formative genre of modernism, that of expressionism.  Stylistically, Miss Lonelyhearts is interesting because of West's proximity to Dashiell Hammett and the "hardboiled" school of American Crime Fiction.   It's a blending of high and low culture that pre-dates "film noir" by decades, completely separate and independent preceding force. 

  I was struck, again by just how vile parts of Miss Lonelyhearts are- genuinely like cancellable/get kicked out of school libraries level stuff.  For example, Miss Lonelyhearts and his newspaper buddies are getting drunk at a bar and one of his buddies talks about the gang rape of a woman writer as a punishment for being a woman who dares to write about the working classes.  And of course, the story itself turns on a false accusation of rape against Miss Lonelyhearts (he only beat her up!)

  And I was also more cognizant of the fact that West's canonical elevation via this text didn't come until the late 1950's, when a compilation of his books/stories were released and garnered him the kind of wide spread audience that had eluded him while he was alive.

ORIGINAL REVIEW FROM 3/19/18

  I'd convinced myself that I had actually read Miss Lonelyhearts, when in fact, what had happened, is that I had owned a book which combined Miss Lonelyhearts with his other hit, Day of the Locust, read Day of the Locust, never read Miss Lonelyhearts, and then lost the book.   That is how Miss Lonelyhearts became a skip in the 1001 Books project, remedied today via an audio book version I checked out from the Los Angeles Public Library.

  Miss Lonelyhearts is dark, dark, dark, decades ahead of it's time in terms of the tone, which is called "expressionist" because it was written in 1933 and expressionism was the avant-garde art movement of the time, maybe also because the quasi-hysterical affect of the main character, the unnamed male newspaper columnist in charge of the Miss Lonelyhearts column for a New York tabloid.   You'd have to jump ahead to William Burroughs and Hubert Selby to find writers who depict urban America with such grotesque regard.