Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

Two works of fiction which depict West's nightmare vision of Los Angeles pre-1940, which has, oddly, almost completely come true but is no longer considered a nightmare-- it's just LA.

Lean, vicious, brilliant, and oddly familiar, these two novellas weren't quite what I expected. Even though it's very short and its prose is ruthlessly economical, I had a lot of trouble getting my head around "Miss Lonelyhearts," which, despite all the cynicism (provided in bulk by Shrike, the

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editor) and black humor on display, plays out like an extended dream sequence, occasionally interrupted by bursts of clear-eyed exposition. The setting's gritty and there's a lot of sleaze and Prohibition-era boozing, but its seem less like people and more like tragic archetypes. Jonathan Lethem, who wrote the preface, has it right when he says that, to paraphrase, it's a ruthlessly unsentimental novel about sentimentality. Even in this context, Miss Lonelyhearts makes for something of an unlikely protagonist: you could argue that he's is fighting to maintain his humanity in a world that's set on destroying it, but he can also be about as drunk and mendacious as anybody else in the story. Maybe West was talking about the ability of literature to produce empathy: his genuine feelings for the poor souls that write him letters is perhaps the only thing that differentiates him from the rest of the novel's characters.

I found "The Day of the Locust" easier to deal with, and, although its not as well known as "Miss Lonelyhearts," think it might be the more successful work of these two. Books that describe Los Angeles as a gaudy, obviously faux playground of the imagination aren't exactly rare, but it's strange to see one written when the film industry was in its comparative infancy. The diet fads, weird cults, general hedonism and postmodern architectural mishmash that give LA a bad reputation seems to have been with us for quite a while. His deadpan descriptions of actors and extras wandering around the town in full costume are reminiscent of the dreamlike elements of "Miss Lonelyhearts," but the book, as a whole, seems more grounded. West creates some indelible characters here, including Faye Greener, sort of a malevolent, West-Coast proto-Holly Golightly who is lovely and enchanting while obviating any questions we might have about her sincerity or authenticity. There's also a truculent, tough-taking dwarf and a guy called Homer Simpson involved. And also, curiously, an Ivy League-educated artist. West, who apparently had a real interest in fine art, does a very good job of drawing comparisons between modern Los Angeles and some of the Old Masters, some of whom I'm going to have to look up, and, as the book draws to a close, conflates visual and plot in a way that's amazingly deft and completely effortless. Recommended to anyone who enjoys modern American writing: West beat dozens of later authors to the punch. It's a genuine tragedy for American literature that he died so young.

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5 stars for Miss Lonelyhearts + 3.5 starts for Day of the Locust equal 8.5 stars: divided by 2, which comes to 4.25 stars; round down to the nearest whole number (if the number is even) and you get 4 stars. Add 0.5 stars for being the basis of a 4 star movie "Miss Lonelyhearts" and subtract 1 star

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for being the basis of a 2 star movie "The Day of the Locust" and you get 3.5 stars. Round up to the nearest even whole number and again you get 4 stars.

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Although The Day of the Locust is the longer and more famous of the two works this volume comprises, I preferred Miss Lonelyhearts.

Miss Lonelyhearts is an odd and haunting story: the eponymous protatgonist is actually a young man who's fallen into the job of writing an agony aunt column for a

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newspaper. We see him displayed in a number of set pieces, reacting to the ubiquity of evil and misery in the world. He's also Christ-haunted, in a very Flannery O'Connor-esque way, with some similarly bizarre behavioral results. This novella is sharply-written and memorably disturbing.

The Day of Locust is one of the foundational Hollywood novels, featuring a young studio artist's experiences as he sketches, both literally and figuratively, the brutal outlines of the real characters that inhabit Lala Land. Some of these lost souls are unforgettable, and as the story reaches a feverish climax, we are left wondering if there's any hope at all for the great mass of us.

Recommended, for the power of West's writing, and for these works' hard-edged portrayal of the 1930s, and of the unchanging depths of human nature itself.

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The letters to Miss Lonelyhearts serve to unravel the illusion of meaning, and reveal the actual absurdity of human existence. Miss Lonelyhearts’ compatriots don’t see it at all, taking the suffering as a joke; and being too preoccupied with booze and sex, they will never see it. But

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Lonelyhearts has no choice. By being forced to deal with this existential angst, he searches for ways of dealing with it. The path he chooses is that of religion. This is not surprising, since he had already shown to be preoccupied with the Christ figure.

Halfway through Day of the Locust, I wanted it to be over. I just didn't want to read anymore. I put it down for a few days, screwed up my nerves, then slogged through the rest of it. The brief respite did me some good, I think.

God, what a depressing story. I felt it sucking the life out of me. Pulling back the cover of a glamorous Hollywood, and showing the ugly, seedy underbelly, this story left me with a feeling of unease. And relief. Relief that I wasn't part of it. Although it was set during the depression, I have a feeling that it probably hasn't changed all that much.

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I read Miss Lonelyhearts a few years ago, after reading a recommendation from Harold Bloom, and only just finished The Day of the Locust. The first I read too long ago to provide commentary; the second is a bit slow to start, eventually rising to a crescendo, its metaphorical 'day of the locust', a

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gratifying, dense and highly emotional end.

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A sharp, concise novella, showing the coarseness of human relations from the point of view of a young set designer recently moved to LA to work in the picture business. Set in the 30s, the story vividly illustrates the falseness of various hangers-on and would-be stars, and reveals the corruption

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at the heart of glittering Hollywood…and at the heart of its hopefuls. The Depression is never far away from these characters, who want so badly to grab the gold ring. And at the end, the horror beneath the glitter is revealed in all its ugliness, in a violent and ludicrous riot of movie patrons waiting for a glimpse of their celebrity idols,

Nathaniel West satirized human nature and American culture of his time through the creation of a series of characters known as "grotesques." Miss Lonelyhearts is set in New York and its characters are journalists; The Day of the Locust is in Hollywood. The set pieces in Day of the Locust include a tour of the various exotic sets on a back lot; a charge up a "hill" that collapses beneath the actors, in a movie about the Napoleonic Wars; a vicious cock fight in a Hollywood garage; and the final riot. These descriptions, in particular, are unforgettable—even more so than the characters: the would-be starlet and her dying ex-vaudeville father; a "cowboy" and his Mexican buddy; and Homer Simpson (!), a displaced midwesterner, with strange, uncontrollable hands, and hopeless dreams of love.

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I love the man's writing style and narrative voice, even as I hated the ending of "The Day of the Locust." In any case, this really is one of those classics of the realm of literature, even as it is not necessarily the easiest or most purely entertaining reading. Still, the characters and story are

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finely and deeply crafted, and it is definitely well worth the time taken reading it.

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Of these two novellas, Miss Lonelyhearts was by far my favorite. "Miss Lonelyhearts" is actually a male employee of a New York newspaper who write the advice column much in the vein of Ann Landers. He initially treats his job as a huge joke, but day after day of letters dealing with horribly

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depressing issues, he kinda cracks and becomes extremely disillusioned with humanity. The bulk of the story is Miss Lonelyhearts trying to free himself from depression through art, alcohol, sex, and finally religion. That's all I'll say...other than the ending is a bit like if Flannery O'Connor set one of her stories in New York city rather than the South...highly recommended short read.

Day of the Locust is fine. It gets mentioned a lot for being a book that epitomizes Hollywood and all of the absurdity of Southern California during the Golden Age of Films. I enjoyed it, but the story does come off a bit like a convoluted soap opera at times, which I guess is fitting.

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I have two reviews for this in my LT because I think the two novellas deserve to be appraised separately. Day of the Locust was way more comprehensible and less of a mindfuck than Miss Lonelyhearts. I love the writing here, which emulates some of the better aspects of hardboiled detective fiction,

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with a slightly more absurd gloss. As for the characters and story, it's a pretty broad Hollywood satire that is hard to appreciate in light of all the dozens of Hollywood satires that have succeeded it. But this is one of the originals, and I imagine that a lot of the images of Hollywood that reside in the common consciousness are derived from this work.

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(Miss Lonelyhearts review) A re-read, according to my records, for one of my f2f reading groups.

This is a dark, dark classic. A young man, having accepted a job as a agony columnist with a title 'Miss Lonelyheats', finds himself driven to despair by the letters he receives, and the lack of help he

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can provide. By turns angry, cynical, depressed, helpless, drunk, he searches for some sort of meaning, while being teased and scorned by his fellow journalists, who are misogynistic and cynical in the extreme, venting their anger on whoever they perceive as weaker and more downtrodden than they are. Through the story, he is only referred to by his title, teased, emasculated and virtually erased. By turns he gets involved with one of the letter-writers, a predatory woman married to a man she scorns; tries to find solace with a woman he has proposed to recently but cannot really connect with; is haunted by an obsession with belief and unbelief and ferocious nightmares.

This whole novella felt like a nightmare to me, almost underground, set in 1932, in dark speakeasies and bare apartments. In one episode, he and his fiancee attempt to go back to the land, try to recreate in a weekend the Eden out of which all people have been cast, but it doesn't help. At the very end, having found what might have been an epiphany, he encounters violence, making him in some ways a Christ figure but not guaranteeing any redemption.

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Overall, the "grotesques" (as described by F. Scott Fitzgerald) in the books (two for one!) really cut through to describe the beginning of what I'd call late stage capitalism. I am, as ever, a fan of succinct wordplay, and the fact that you get so much character information and development in such

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short works makes these pieces masterful. I confess I almost gave these three stars because of some triggering sections, but perhaps that's the point? Now, I'll take each in turn, and below the reviews will be another section with my favorite quotes, because I can't not pull them.

Miss Lonelyhearts

In the words of Fall Out Boy (dare I!?), Miss Lonelyhearts has a "loony god complex." Women from across New York City write with truly terrible situations in which they are stuck largely because they are women. The only real options for them--to my mind--seem to be "do nothing" or "overturn the patriarchy." Cut back to Miss Lonelyhearts who can't unsee these terrible stories which haunt him, but perhaps because he is a "he" and because he is the (nonbelieving?) son of a preacher, he writes back with empty posturing. Miss Lonelyhearts is stuck in his own turmoil and I'm not sure if there is any saving to be done with anyone. An excellent, incredibly sad premise.

The Day of the Locust

In the words of Bonnie Tyler, "We're living in a powder keg giving off sparks." This is the Hollywood of the 1930s. People run to this sunny dreamworld only to be met with a fun house packed with temptation and uncertainty and failure. West describes Hollywood movie lots as a dumping grown of failed dreams, and you see that through the (failed and often gory) goals of the characters.

Miss Lonelyhearts Quote

A useful theory: “He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature … the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worthwhile.”

The Day of the Locust Quotes

A key description: "He crossed the bridge and followed a little path that ended at a Greek temple dedicated to Eros. The god himself lay face downward in a pile of old newspapers and bottles.
From the steps of the temple, he could see in the distance a road lined with Lombardy poplars. It was the one on which he had lost the cuirassiers. He pushed his way through a tangle of briars, old flats and iron junk, skirting the skeleton of a Zeppelin, a bamboo stockade, an adobe fort, the wooden horse of Troy, a flight of baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended against the branches of an oak, part of the Fourteenth Street elevated station, a Dutch windmill, the bones of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimac, a corner of a Mayan temple, until he finally reached the road."

On 1930s Hollywood churches: He spent his nights at the different Hollywood churches, drawing the worshipers. He visited the “Church of Christ, Physical” where holiness was attained through the constant use of chestweights and spring grips; the “Church Invisible” where fortunes were told and the dead made to find lost objects; the “Tabernacle of the Third Coming” where a woman in male clothing preached the “Crusade Against Salt”; and the “Temple Moderne” under whose glass and chromium roof “Brain-Breathing, the Secret of the Aztecs” was taught.

Another theory: Tod didn’t laugh at the man’s rhetoric. He knew it was unimportant. What mattered were his messianic rage and the emotional response of his hearers. They sprang to their feet, shaking their fists and shouting.

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