Customer Reviews

Miss Lonelyhearts

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This work is in a way very difficult to read. The painful stories Miss Lonelyhearts receive often have a grotesque dimension but also may touch the heart. The novel's ironic play with its hero who is at once fake and real sufferer, sympathizer and exploiter makes it difficult for the reader to know how exactly to take it. The writing has a violence and power in it but its tragic story too somehow misses to make its fullest case in sympathy, for Miss Lonelyhearts appears somehow real and unreal at once.
The work of a brilliant but deeply disturbed young writer whose life and work had no second act.

Miss Lonelyhearts is the Dear Abby of her day during America's Great Depression.

But Miss Lonelyhearts is a he, not a she, and that's only the beginning of the ways Miss Lonelyhearts deceives her readers.

Though he feels pity for his readers and their terrible lives, Miss Lonelyhearts has little to offer to help them.

Oddly, the most disturbed character in the book is Miss Lonelyhearts himself. He obsesses over the troubles of his readers but no one is able to help him. His editor doesn't even try, regarding the whole Miss Lonelyhearts column as a joke, a publicity stunt. His fiancé suggests he quit the job, something he can't bring himself to do. Miss Lonelyhearts tries several ways to help himself but all fail.

This is a very short novel, a novella really, but it is very thoughtful and darkly comedic. I read it twice, the second time after reading some commentary about the novel, and the second reading was a rich reading for me.

The commentary says that Miss Lonelyhearts is a Christ-like figure who, in the end, sacrifices himself for his people, but to no end. The author, the commentary goes on to write, saw there was no place for the innocent, the sacrificial, in the evil modern world.

This review is for the Dramatists Play Service Inc. paperback edition, January 1998. MISS LONELYHEARTS, a play based on Nathanael West's novel of the same title, was the second of five plays written by Mr. Teichmann that played on Broadway. It played October 3 to October 12, 1957, twelve performances.

William Shrike, editor of the Chronicle, chooses a young, leg-man reporter to write a new advice to the lovelorn column in the newspaper. The title of the column, and the young man's name in the play, are Miss Lonelyhearts.

Shrike perceives the column as a mockery, its only purpose to boost circulation. Miss Lonelyhearts initially handles the spoof well, but then begins to feel empathy for the people writing to him and guilty about the insincerity of his responses. This conflict puts him at odds with himself and Shrike, which leads to a tragic ending.

Although the play includes excerpts from some of the letters to Miss Lonelyhearts, it omits his replies, which are only characterized in the dialogue. This one-sided exchange diminishes the thrust of the plot. The key issued is told, not shown.