Shade
New Member
Nathanael West is one of the ones that got away. Born in 1903, he died in 1940 when he crashed his car on return from his honeymoon, leaving four short works of fiction. His best known is The Day of the Locust (1939), a satire on Hollywood which I haven't read, and which is usually packaged in the UK along with The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), his earliest work. It's also available in a new Penguin Red Classic edition issued earlier this year, which has the distinction of spelling the author's name wrong. Nice.
I read his others yesterday. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and A Cool Million (1934) are published together in a Penguin Modern Classic, but currently out of print and almost unavailable in the UK, even used on Amazon. This seems something close to a national scandal, when you consider how good - no, how great - they are. They are bitterly black, bleak and unsentimental satires of America during the Depression which also have plenty of resonance for our own times.
When I say bleak, I mean that Miss Lonelyhearts makes Richard Yates look like Tom Sharpe, and at 80 pages it even undercuts Yates in laconic style. The first twenty pages alone contain rape, adultery, alcoholism, disability, suicidal despair, blasphemy and not many jokes. But what do you expect of a story set in the world of newspapers? Miss Lonelyhearts, who is only ever referred to by that name, is a male journalist who took the job on the paper's problem page as an easy ride, only to find that the suffering and anguish which seeps out through every letter he receives, is burying itself in his soul and driving him to distraction. Things are made worse by his knowledge that the answer to all his readers' problems is God and Jesus Christ, but his editor, a cruel jocular bully named Shrike, insists that he should only ever deal on the surface of things in his responses.
Despite the spiralling misery of the storyline - I was open-mouthed in shock at times at how willing West was to inflict brutality, as much psychological as physical, on his characters - Miss Lonelyhearts is as pink-tongued and full of life as you could wish. It's an invigorating read, like an open window to a crowd of tortured souls, letting in a refreshing blast of air that knocks you off your feet as you read.
A Cool Million had a lot to live up to then, and positioned second (even though it's the longer piece, at 120 pages) and regarded by reviewers on Amazon US as a minor work, I didn't have high expectations. So I was surprised to like it even more than Miss L. Its subtitle, The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, tells it all, and can be taken both literally and figuratively. It's a picaresque story of a young man trying to make his fortune in a world where his mother needs to repay her mortgage within three weeks to stop the bank selling her home to a New York store for a window display on Colonial style living. As that suggests, the overwhelming sensation is of reading the best story ever wrote, 65 years before Saunders took up his pen.
It has the edge over Miss Lonelyhearts in pure reading pleasure because it's extremely funny, and full of excellent narrative jokes. It introduces a range of likely and unlikely characters, including a former President of the US who now runs a provincial bank and dreams of starting up a fascist organisation in America (the Leather Shirts), and has much to say about anti-Semitism and anti-Communist witchhunting (not bad in the latter case, as it was ahead even of Joe McCarthy in that one). It's quite simply one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I've had in years.
I read his others yesterday. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and A Cool Million (1934) are published together in a Penguin Modern Classic, but currently out of print and almost unavailable in the UK, even used on Amazon. This seems something close to a national scandal, when you consider how good - no, how great - they are. They are bitterly black, bleak and unsentimental satires of America during the Depression which also have plenty of resonance for our own times.
When I say bleak, I mean that Miss Lonelyhearts makes Richard Yates look like Tom Sharpe, and at 80 pages it even undercuts Yates in laconic style. The first twenty pages alone contain rape, adultery, alcoholism, disability, suicidal despair, blasphemy and not many jokes. But what do you expect of a story set in the world of newspapers? Miss Lonelyhearts, who is only ever referred to by that name, is a male journalist who took the job on the paper's problem page as an easy ride, only to find that the suffering and anguish which seeps out through every letter he receives, is burying itself in his soul and driving him to distraction. Things are made worse by his knowledge that the answer to all his readers' problems is God and Jesus Christ, but his editor, a cruel jocular bully named Shrike, insists that he should only ever deal on the surface of things in his responses.
Despite the spiralling misery of the storyline - I was open-mouthed in shock at times at how willing West was to inflict brutality, as much psychological as physical, on his characters - Miss Lonelyhearts is as pink-tongued and full of life as you could wish. It's an invigorating read, like an open window to a crowd of tortured souls, letting in a refreshing blast of air that knocks you off your feet as you read.
A Cool Million had a lot to live up to then, and positioned second (even though it's the longer piece, at 120 pages) and regarded by reviewers on Amazon US as a minor work, I didn't have high expectations. So I was surprised to like it even more than Miss L. Its subtitle, The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, tells it all, and can be taken both literally and figuratively. It's a picaresque story of a young man trying to make his fortune in a world where his mother needs to repay her mortgage within three weeks to stop the bank selling her home to a New York store for a window display on Colonial style living. As that suggests, the overwhelming sensation is of reading the best story ever wrote, 65 years before Saunders took up his pen.
It has the edge over Miss Lonelyhearts in pure reading pleasure because it's extremely funny, and full of excellent narrative jokes. It introduces a range of likely and unlikely characters, including a former President of the US who now runs a provincial bank and dreams of starting up a fascist organisation in America (the Leather Shirts), and has much to say about anti-Semitism and anti-Communist witchhunting (not bad in the latter case, as it was ahead even of Joe McCarthy in that one). It's quite simply one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I've had in years.
