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Nathanael West : Novels and Other Writings : The Dream Life of Balso Snell / Miss Lonelyhearts / A Cool Million / The Day of the Locust / Letters (Library of America)

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Little known during his lifetime, Nathanael West is today considered one of the 20th Century's most influential authors, a writer whose pitch-black satires focus on the emptiness of an American society choking on its own regurgitated mythology. His reputation rests squarely upon two works: MISS LONELYHEARTS, the tale of a newspaper advice columnist who is overwhelmed by the tragedies of those who write to him for advice, and THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, a savage vision of American society turning upon the illusions fosted upon them by a Hollywood mentality.

Both MISS LONELYHEARTS and LOCUST are powerful works, every bit as vital and unnerving today as when they were first published in the 1930s; I recommend both very strongly. But the remainder of West's cannon is extremely problematic. Like the little girl with the curl, when West was good he was very, very good, and when he was bad he was horrid. And with its inclusion of his lesser writings, this Library of America anthology gives us a detailed tour of the latter.

THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL, West's first novel, was an experimental tale that parodies intellectual pretentions through religious, mythological, and aesthetic motifs--but while it has a number of fascinating ideas and conceits, it is at best an interesting failure. A COOL MILLION, West's third novel, is a satire on the Horatio Alger myth; it is considerably more readable than SNELL, but it lags far behind both LONELYHEARTS and LOCUST.

The rest of the anthology consists of a failed Broadway play, an unfilmed screenplay, unpublished stories and fragments, juvenalia, and personal letters. Both the play and screenplay--GOOD HUNTING and BEFORE THE FACT respectively--are written very much against the grain; it is not difficult to see why the play failed and director Hitchcock (who filmed BEFORE THE FACT as SUSPICION) ordered a completely new script. The remaining items are mediocre at best, dire at worst, and although West's letters are interesting from a historical standpoint they have no literary merit per se.

West's life was cut short by an automobile accident just as he seemed to be finding his true voice, and it is interesting to speculate on how his writing might have developed if he had lived to write more. This is an important collection--but it's importance is largely of an academic nature rather than a literary one, of more interest to the serious student of American literature than to a casual reader. If you fall into the latter catagory, I strongly recommend that you read MISS LONELYHEARTS and DAY OF THE LOCUST (both of which are available in inexpensive editions) rather than purchase this particular volume--and only after, if you like so many others among us find yourself fascinated by West's work, contemplate purchase of this anthology.

Thanks to the efforts of a bunch of Harvard grad students, this is the only book you need to become a cocktail party expert on Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein, 1903; died in Hollywood in 1940). My favorite part of the book is the capsule biography in the back. He drops out of high school (like me!) and alters his transcript to get into Tufts. He flunks out of Tufts but gets hold of a transcript for another Nathan Weinstein, who was apparently a pretty good student. He uses this to get into Brown and becomes an Ivy League graduate in 1924.

Oh yes, the writing... West's prose could easily pass for a New Yorker story circa 1985. Furthermore, his characters behave a lot like our contemporaries. None of this struck me as remarkable but I think it accounts for why he was so widely admired by good writers of his day and so roundly ignored by readers during the 1930s (perhaps 6,000 copies of his books were sold during his lifetime). Even if his writing style hadn't been so modern, releasing the bleak Miss Lonelyhearts in 1933 cannot have been an inspired marketing idea (the publisher went bankrupt just as the book was released).

If you want to read just one West novel, my personal choice would be Day of the Locust (1939), his last work. It is about the people destroyed by their dreams of California and Hollywood, seen through the eyes of a journeyman studio artist. He's obsessed with an aspiring actress, Faye Greener: "Her invitation wasn't to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn't expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn't even have time to sweat or close your eyes."

The strangest novel in the collection is A Cool Million, wherein a Candide-like young man, Lemuel Pitkin, goes out to make his fortune in what a variety of Panglosses keep telling him is the Land of Opportunity. As in a Horatio Alger story, Pitkin meets a lot of rich and powerful men who are in a position to help him. West departs from Alger in that Pitkin is cheated and mutilated by all of his encounters with the rest of humanity.

The quartet of piquant short novels Nathanael West had published by the time he died in a car accident at the age of thirty-seven occupy a unique niche in American literature. A Hollywood screenwriter who migrated from studio to studio in search of sustenance, West was a humorist with a warped conscience, a young man who had fraudulently gained admission to Brown University and probably belonged there anyway, an intellectual misfit trying to make a living and a name for himself in a glitzy industry. Like Kafka with a comic-strip aesthetic, West saw the world and the people around him as the tortured products of an insane creator, cartoons to be stretched, punched, and mutilated.

"Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous," West observes in "The Day of the Locust," the last of his novels, which made an indelible impression upon me when I first read it a few years ago. Ironically, sadness is definitely not the note he strikes in his portrayal of a congregation of hilarious cretins who populate the fringes of 1930s Hollywood; it is a very brash and "loud" novel, but incredibly it is more refined and less outrageous than its three predecessors. The surrealistic narrative of "The Dream Life of Balso Snell," by contrast, is not to be read with a queasy stomach. The unassuming Mr. Snell happens upon a giant wooden horse--apparently the same the ancient Greeks used to infiltrate Troy--and, entering through the posterior, finds the intestines inhabited by unhinged writers in search of an audience.

In "Miss Lonelyhearts," the title character (who is a man) is an advice columnist for a newspaper, unable to muster anything better than empty platitudes in response to tearful letters from barely literate and improbably pathetic losers who are mostly beyond help. He is not, however, doing this just as a hoax; he approaches his role soberly because the trust his correspondents place in him forces him to "examine the values by which he lives." If "Miss Lonelyhearts" seems farcical, consider how accurately it prophesies the Jerry Springer era of televised dirty laundry and voluntary public embarrassment.

"A Cool Million" is a relentlessly cruel Horatio Alger parody that follows the misadventures of Lemuel Pitkin, a Vermont boy who goes to New York to try to make a fortune in order to save his mother's house from foreclosure but is foiled continually as he encounters an endless procession of human sleaze: corrupt businessmen, brutish cops, brothel operators and their clientele, rapists, thieves, and con men. (The screen story West wrote for "A Cool Million"--a project never filmed--is understandably so much cleaner and more optimistic that it hardly resembles the original novel.)

The four novels combined constitute only half of the Library of America volume, the rest of which includes miscellaneous fragments, plays, and letters. Among the detritus are the unsuccessful play "Good Hunting," a relatively conventional satire of war and war correspondence, an unfilmed screenplay based on Francis Iles's novel "Before the Fact" (a different screenplay by another author was used by the studio instead, and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as "Suspicion"), and a college essay praising Euripides to the stars. This juxtaposition effectively illuminates the two dichotomous worlds of West--the true artist and the commercial hack, the grotesque emerging from the mundane.

This book had some of my all time favourite writings in it. Of everything i've read in my lifetime, i've never read anything that comes close to nathanael west's mastery of dark imagery and dark commentary on the way the human mind works. Miss lonelyhearts has the feeling of a very strange comic strip to it, as it is told in small little bits, each bit with its own title. It uses alot of religious imagery, but in a very dark way. Miss lonely hearts is a writer for an advice column who develops some form of a god complex, or rather, he see's himself as some sort of martyr who will inevitably suffer to prevent other people from suffering. The imagery was very dark feeling, and there was just the right amount of a random-crazy-insane sense to it where it is scary, but close enough to reality to make me wonder how close everyone in the world is to actually going crazy. There is a similar concept in The Day of the Locust. People living in hollywood, they all want to lead normal lives, but there is some part of them that doubts EVERYTHING and leads to a deep frustration that can only find an outlet in the form of mass destruction. The ending was, to me, the best ending to a book ever written. A wonderful insane scary end to it all. Everytime i read it or see the movie i feel very disturbed for days... a very thought provoking story, it taught me to question how close we all are to... well... going nuts. I read many of the letters Nathanael West wrote... most were not too terribly wonderful, mostly he was just seeking advice/editing/ideas for his writings. But reading some of the letters explained alot about his ideas and motivations behind his more significant works. They did bother me a little because i thought The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts (and others) were the product of only Nathanael West, but the letters indicate that much of his ideas were edited and deleted by other people. Also, there is an outline for a story he never wrote that sounded like a very promising idea. It was about a friendship club, people pay money to join the Golden Friendship Club (or something like that, i forget). I thought it was an excellent idea because it deals with this strange inner lonelyness that most people don't ever really recognize. It's very depressing... i believe people try to remain strong and convince themselves of independence and security, but there is a lonelyness that gnaws away at them, and if it goes unrecognized it prevents them from ever reaching their full mental potential. It is a very sad thing to realize, and i believe this story touches some part of that depressing lonelyness and makes it partially surface... sending the reader into a dark realm of self discovery, if they allow that to happen. All of the writings in this book are dark, tragic, and create an internal fear that could not be found ANYWHERE else. It is really a very sad book, don't read it if you don't want to be sad.

There is a problem with the publication of material by a talented writer who died in an accident before he could fully grow out of his pupa stage.
Allegedly, West wrote 4 short novels before he died in a car crash. Well, in my reckoning there were 3 and a half. The Dream Life of Balso Snell can't seriously be counted as a novella or long story or novelette, it is i.m.o. an experimental text withou interest.

Miss Lonelyhearts is a lovely short novel that I like a lot and that I have reviewed with 5 stars separately.

A Cool Million is a bore of a parody. Most parodies are bores. This is making fun of Horatio Alger, but come on, is there anybody out there who can still laugh about Horatio Alger? (Sorry, in case that you believe in THE AMERICAN DREAM, you may want to stop reading here.) The positivest idea that came to my mind when I tried to read A Cool Million was: hey, this is like Candide making fun of The Best of All Worlds. Indeed, but after Voltaire did that brillantly some centuries go, do we need to re-run it? I don't think so.

The Day of the Locust starts brillantly too: LA Burning! A young painter from the East Coast has let himself be hired to Hollywood as a screen or set designer, and apart from being overwhelmed by a brainless wood-be starlet (a very human touch, no criticism here), who makes her real career as a well paid service industry employee, he sees the place, its people, its buildings, like a painter, and it is atrocious. The novel starts with verve and I was prepared to love it, but then I dropped out: the man West had not learned to keep up speed. There are several chapters in this Hollywood Odyssee, which are bordering on the slow and boring. In other words, I would have given the separate novel not more than 4 stars.
No doubt he was a very talented writer... Why did he need to have that accident?

I just flipped through the second half of the book, which has short texts, letters and such, and I thought: is this oeuvre really big enough to merit the inclusion in the LoA?
I admit that I may be wrong with my doubts... Tell me!

I had Nathanael West's novels from college, and was looking for a copy of Western Union Boy, among other writings. This volume was resonably priced, contained everything I was looking for, and arrived early in pristine condition.

It's beyond me how anyone could describe the prose of Lonelyhearts and Locust as "artless" (as one reviewer did). I can understand how some might find the bitterness and despair of these two works not to their liking. But artless? Years after reading these two novels, I can recall entire passages by heart and picture the scenes vividly. Such effects are not achieved by artless amateur writers, only by those with considerable literary talent.

That said, I must agree with the other reviewers here: The remaining stuff collected by LOA is distinctly second-rate, the product of West on a bad day or before he reached his stride. Only if you are a scholar researching twentieth-century American novelists should you buy this volume. Get the inexpensive paperback book published by New Directions, containing the two imperishable works Lonelyhearts and Locust.

As a long-standing and avid reader of the fiction volumes produced by the Library of America, I eagerly awaited this book and now I can't understand why they printed it. I stopped reading after about 400 pages and haven't been able to garner the energy and patience for more. 'Miss Lonelyhearts' was slightly interesting, but a very slight novel written in an artless manner. As for the rest of what I read, I consider it time not at all well spent. Dreiser, another author featured by the Library of America, created artless prose also...but he did so in the context of engaging stories that offered intellectual stimulation. I'll give this book away rather than have it consume valuable shelf space.