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Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

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"Miss Lonelyhearts" is the 26-year-old son of a Baptist preacher, working in New York in 1933 as the writer of a gossip column. A sensitive person, he reads thirty or so traumatic letters from readers every day, ranging from women with too many children and abusive husbands, to people who have no idea where their next meal will come from, and he must offer some sort of hope to each one. Shrike, a features editor, is his antithesis, a nihilist who mocks Miss Lonelyhearts's Christian faith, every other philosophy which might offer hope, and Miss Lonelyhearts's every attempt to escape from the sadness of his life. Sex and alcohol do not help, and Miss Lonelyhearts gradually descends into obsessive behavior, hypochondria, and religious fanaticism while still trying to help his readers, several of whom he meets in person.

Though the novel is often described as having dark humor, its emotional power is so overwhelming that few people will find much to laugh about here. Shrike, whose name is both satiric and symbolic (shrikes are birds which impale their prey on thorns, much as a butcher hangs meat on a hook), is bent on destroying Miss Lonelyhearts and what he represents (the search for hope), and at a party Shrike has all the guests read aloud and mock the letters from Miss Lonelyhearts's desk--about paralyzed children, a teenager without a nose, suicidal mothers, and exhausted caregivers.

Tautly constructed with overlapping motifs and symbols, the novel is firmly rooted in the Depression and the edge-of-disaster lives of ordinary Americans. As Miss Lonelyhearts becomes drawn into his readers' heart-rending problems, he tries to become a rock, emotionally and symbolically, and as he examines the sadness around him, he also begins to think that God has sent him to perform the kinds of miracles that God performs. West's satiric attitude toward religion here and the use of Miss Lonelyhearts as a Christ-figure, filled with agony and passion, also suggest some sort of satiric Christian martyrdom, but the ending, when it comes, is shocking and unexpected.

Extremely emotional and filled with cynicism and despair, the novel is the consummate example of Depression literature, firmly establishing the attitudes and philosophies that prevailed as people tried to deal with events so overwhelming that no philosophy, other than nihilism, could fully explain them. West's focus on themes and philosophies and the symbols which illuminate them prevents this brilliant but often heart-rending novel from descending into melodrama and pathos. This edition, edited by Harold Bloom, offers a full range of critical interpretations. n Mary Whipple

The 'Miss Lonelyhearts' of Nathanael West's 1933 novella is a male reporter for the New York Post-Dispatch, whose cynical, boozy, manic editor Shrike has assigned him the task of responding with advice to myriads of heartsick/soulsick letter-writers. Boozy and bipolar himself, Miss L - no other name is given him - at first takes his role as a huge joke, until the heartsickness he discovers begins to resonate with his own religious despair. In the first sentence, we readers find him at his desk, painfully unable to produce the necessary hypocritical pap to meet his copy deadline. West writes:

""When Miss Lonelyhearts quit work, he found that the weather had turned warm and that the air smelt as if it had been artificially heated. He decided to walk to Delehanty's speakeasy for a drink. In order to get there, it was necessary to cross a little park.
He entered the park park at the North Gate and swallowed mouthfuls of the heavy shade that curtained its arch. he walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on the path like a spear. It pierced him like a spear.
As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.
What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and all the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet.""

That, I submit, is awfully fine writing, imaginatively equal to the best of Nabokov, and fine writing is the fundamental reason for reading fiction, isn't it? But it's also awfully focused, concentrated writing. The spear metaphor, for instance, hints ever so subtly of the spear that pierced the side of Christ on the Cross, especially since Christ had already been alluded to, semi-jocularly, a page earlier. Slowly and slyly, West lets us sense that this short tale of world-weary absurdity is a Passion play, and that the foolish pleas and plaints of the maimed, grotesque, hapless correspondents are the sum of human woe. And for the Cynic, to empathize even scornfully with the woes of humanity is fatal.

Readers familiar with the stories and novellas of Flannery O'Connor will surely notice an affinity, possibly even a transmission of influence from West in the 1930s to O'Connor in the late 1940s and 1950s. West's characters, however, are both less grotesque and more intriguing - being more accessible to sympathy - than O'Connor's. Likewise, West's Christ-hunger is less inhumane, less anti-humanist, than O'Connor's hate-soaked hopelessness. One could imagine a benign God feeling pity for West's sad sinners.

I read this book in college, decades ago, and immediately recommended it to my high-school-aged sister, who wrote a 'book report' on it. Neither of us remember what she wrote, or what we thought then that the book was about, but my sister's English teacher - a former local beauty queen - gave the paper an F. "You were supposed to read a classic," she jeered, "not something you picked up from the rack at the bus station!"

I've got news for her; this is a classic. I'm profoundly glad that I picked it up again.