MISS LONELYHEARTS / THE DAY OF THE LOCUST
by Nathanael West
o-o
A man is assigned to a letters column called Miss Lonelyhearts in a newspaper during depression-era America, and he is referred to throughout the novel only as Miss Lonelyhearts. The letters as one might suspect are desperate, and detail accounts of terrible, unhinged misery. They are beginning to take their toll on Miss Lonelyhearts and he wants out, for he too leads a rather miserable existence and can no longer muster the facade of the wise sage, the reassuring know-it-all. His boss Shreik won't hear of it though; Miss Lonelyhearts is just too damn good at what he does.
Amazing premise, and the characters are unique and bizarre and feel fleshed out.
The only problem however is when the story isn't about any of that at all, which is unfortunately most of the story. It ends up for the most part oscillating between Miss Lonelyhearts' affair with Shreik's wife, and another relationship he's got going with a more traditional girl, who for the most part he treats pretty terribly. And then there's a bunch of Christ stuff that West veers off into that I don't find at all interesting and generally goes over my head.
Could've been a great little novella, but one can't help but feel that West, likely in a strange haze of excessive inebriation, completely missed the mark.
DAY OF THE LOCUST I was almost certainly meant to like, it being about an artist disillusioned with Hollywood, which in a sense stands for the entire notion of “the American Dream”. Todd Hackett, a talented but evidently awkward young man is a set designer in Los Angeles, who in his free time works on a massive painting of the city engulfed in flames. Like MISS LONELYHEARTS however, Nathanael West strays off course, meandering along paths irrelevant, something you'd think would be difficult to do in such a slim little volume. Narrative momentum is lost early on, along with any interest in Hackett, his sad life, and any of the other characters barely sketched into the story.