The Complete Works Of Nathanael West

by Nathanael West

The four novels gathered here, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, The Day of the Locust and The Dream Life of Balso Snell, constitute the complete longer works of one the most brilliant and original American writers.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, American, Short Stories, Literature, Novels, Collections

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Born Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein to prosperous Jewish parents, from the first West set about creating his own legend, and anglicising his name was part of that process. At Brown University in Rhode Island, he befriended writer and humourist S. J. Perelman (who later married his sister), and started writing and drawing cartoons. As his cousin Nathan Wallenstein also attended Brown, West took to borrowing his work and presenting it as his own. He almost didn't graduate at all, on account of failing a crucial course in modern drama. West indulged in a little dramatics of his own and, in tearful contrition, convinced a gullible professor to upgrade his marks.

After spending a couple of years in Paris, where he wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, he returned to New York, where he managed (badly by all accounts) a small hotel, the Sutton, owned by his family. As well as providing free board for struggling friends like Dashiell Hammett, the job also gave West ample opportunity to observe the strange collection of misfits and drifters who congregated in the hotel's drugstore. Some of these would appear in West's novel Miss Lonelyhearts.

West spent the rest of his days in Hollywood, writing B-movie screenplays for small studios and immersing himself in the unglamorous underworld of Tinseltown, with its dope dealers, extras, gangsters, whores and has-beens. All would end up in West's final masterpiece, The Day of the Locust.

West's life ultimately ended as tragically as his fictions. Recently married, and with better-paid script work coming in, West was happy and successful. Then, returning from a trip to Mexico with his wife Eileen, he crashed his car after ignoring a stop sign and killed them both. This was just one day after the death of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Reviews

[reem · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had already read Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust before I came across this collection. I was very impressed with Nathaneal West's style that I had to dig into the rest of his novels. Alas, there are only four of them in total.

A Cool Million is about the myth surrounding the American dream and follows the story of our hero, Lem Pitkin, as he leaves town to make it in the big city of New York. The misfortunes that follow his endeavour are harrowing to say the least. In this novel it is clear that West harboured intense cynicism and hatred towards what he perceived as a false notion of America and the American dream.

The Dream Life of Balso Snell is charming, weird and extremely funny. My favourite part is when Balso, the protagonist, while journeying through the insides of a Trojan Horse, finds a manuscript that reads a lot like Crime and Punishment. The author of the manuscipt turns out to be a 12 year old boy who claims that he only wrote it because his teacher enjoyed Russian literature and his aim was to sleep with her. He later gives Balso an even more entertaining phamplet for $1.

"I wore my heart and genitals around my neck."

Five stars, my friends.

[Chris Gager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just picked up from the local library on inter-library loan from the Norway, Maine Public Library. I didn't realized that NW has such a small output, but then, I don't know much about him at all except for the film version of "Day of the Locust," which I've seen only bits of ... Donald Sutherland going wacko and stomping somebody. Montgomery Clift starred in "Miss Lonelyhearts" as well as "From Here to Eternity," which I'm still reading.

So ... I found out about the small output thing. NW died in his thirties in a car wreck, supposedly on his way to the funeral of friend F. Scott Fitzgerald's funeral. FSG died the day before ...

Last night I finished the short and weird "The Dream Life of Balso Snell," the author's first ... something. Self-indulgent(but interesting) stream-of-consciousness stuff that reminded me of "Gravity's Rainbow." I strongly suspect that Pynchon read this.

Now well into "Miss Lonelyhearts," which is more straightforward than the first one but only just. It still has plenty of that chaotic dream atmosphere. Think Nabokov w/o the elegance. Nabokov with a permanent sour stomach and headache. Page 75 contains a quote from "The Brothers Karamazov" that I used as a trivia question. Cool!

Near the end of ML and wondering how anyone would think that this would make a good movie. It's ALMOST as crazy as Balso Snell. Good stuff though. Wisecracking nihilism. Definite connection between this and Bartleby the Scrivener. NW even drops the "Ah humanity" quote.

And now done and moving on after last night. I suppose this would be considered experimental/free form prose. It's worth reading but I really don't have a lot to say about it. Head scratching stuff ...

Finished "A Cool Million" last night. It reads like perverted "Pilgrim's Progress"/"Huck Finn"/Odyssey. A poor young schlub gets to learn the hard way the truth about the land of the free and the home of the brave. Textbook scatological. Another 50-100 pages would have been hard to take. There wouldn't have been enough of Lemuel to fill a thimble! I guess the 30's(think Great Depression) gave a lot of people bad attitudes. It surely did to Mr. West.

Now well into "The Day of the Locust," the longest and most "normal" of the author's works. A fairly recent and well-received movie was made out of it. Donald Sutherland as Homer was well cast, but I can't see Karen Black as Faye, who is only supposed to be 17 years old. Burgess Meredith copped an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for playing her dear old dad. Anyway, the tone is as bleak as the three previous "stories," but the delivery is just more conventional. What we get in West's writing is his version of Great Depression reality tossed in the face of American mythology. America the Beautiful ... Land of the Free ... Home of the Brave ... Land of Opportunity ... yadda-yadda-yadda ... It's all pretty grim stuff delivered with a dash of very black, sniggering-snickering humor.

Almost finished last night after reading the devastating cock-fight and party scene, which NW described in lurid, loving detail. Reminds of the drinking party in "The Great Gatsby," also a great scene of degraded humanity. These people need to be punished and I suspect that some, at least, will be. Reviewers have opined that this is the best Los Angeles novel ever. There are some great candidates, including those which came later(Less Than Zero),but this is surely at or near the top of the list.

And so to the apocalyptic ending as West's mass of bored, demanding-of-distractions mob of middle-Americans cuts loose. This book is short and nasty. An unflattering(d'ya THINK?!?!) portrait of La-La-Land and, by extension, the rest of our spiritually dead, consumerist society.

- One of the more interesting observations I read about this story is a comparison of it with "The Great Gatsby" - I can dig that for sure ...

- Just picked a nice hardbound copy of this book at our local library summer book sale. Score!

[Gonzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

American literature is a world of competing cults of personality. Samuel Clemens, the biographer of Joan of Arc, the bitter heathen apologist of Satan, is mainly remembered as Tom and Huck’s wily grandfather. The alleged romance of Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway is based on the atmosphere of Paris cafes, and far exceeds their spare masterworks. Thanks to his reclusivity (and a couple Simpsons cameos) Thomas Pynchon has developed his own totemic following outsized compared to his mostly unreadable novels. This is not to say other nations don’t have their share of great literary figures—Dr. Johnson and Lord Byron come to mind—but to be a success in American letters, it seems one must have an aura greater than his work.

This perhaps explains the astounding underappreciation of Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein), whose best works can stand alongside almost anything America has produced. During his lifetime, cut short by a car crash in 1940, West had only middling popularity. His completed works total just over 400 pages of material, half of which is essentially juvenilia. Though he was friends with many of the literary lights of the 1930s, he never was never part of a “set.” He won tremendous praise from the likes of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Malcolm Cowley, but never an audience. Even in the present, when he is lauded and imitated by the few literary lights we have, West’s name is usually brought up almost as an afterthought.

Americans are a notoriously narcissistic yet unconfident people. We cannot stop talking about ourselves, especially in our literature. The great bogus idea of the “Great American Novel” is an admission that Americans don’t believe we have anything to say if we aren’t talking about ourselves. And the books that have won our praise are self-critical in the most self-satisfying way. The Scarlet Letter has (grotesquely) been contorted into a tale of feminism versus puritanism; Gatsby a tale of our avarice; To Kill a Mockingbird the great indictment of our racism. All these books are optimistic, even when they touch upon dark topics. Even when Americans look at themselves critically, the reflection must be filtered through a lens of romance that assures us, that for all of our faults, we are yet self-improving.

West does not play this game. West is the most uncompromising and cruel of our writers. He stands in the midst of his peers like a terrorist. He is uncompromising in portraying his apocalyptic vision of America and modern man. In this time of breakdown and chaos, it’s about time West gets the dedication he deserves.

Oscar Wilde once said that all bad books are sincere. Maybe the best thing that can be said of West’s two minor novels is that they are incredibly sincere. West’s great novels are so tightly composed that were it not for his inferior ones, we might not notice the same spitefulness is running through all of them.

But Miss Lonelyhearts, West’s second novel, is the best-regarded of all West’s works. Harold Bloom sets it aside As I Lay Dying and the Billy the Bulb segment of Gravity’s Rainbow as one of the greatest works of the 20th Century. One must admire its form, but then again, it’s less than eighty pages long.

In the modern industrialized state, the role once played by wise men and priests, and the consolation once given by God in the confessional, has been replaced by the consolation of quacks and frauds like Miss Lonelyhearts. And Miss L often stands before us like a god who has whipped up the human race as a joke, only to be shocked at their sorry state. The first chapter of the novel is a sample of the letters he receives from the poor readers seeking salve for their cruel fates and deformities: The first has been impregnated again and wants permission to abort the child; the second has a hole in her head and wants to know how to keep people from being terrified by her face.

From the above, I realize that the book may sound tedious. Hack artists throughout the 20th Century tried to convince us (and themselves) that the tools of mass-production have some kind of spiritual weight to them, some value behind the ease of propagating entertainment. The modernists were haunted by the effects of mass media on aesthetics, one which continued until Andy Warhol pushed them to the absurd conclusion. The same is true for James Joyce, the most media savvy of all great writers of the era, and Ulysses is his attempt to attach meaning and significance to an over-stimulated ad man’s quotidian existence. But this was all in vain. The crux and cruelty of life is that all the most important truths are quite simple, yet we are quite weak. The piling-on of technology and media does not add some new spiritual depth to our existences; it merely diverts our eyes away from the bitter truths we would rather ignore.

At the center of the novel is one of the oldest of all philosophical questions, and the one that constitutes maybe the best and most durable critique of Christianity: Why were we put on this planet—and by a loving God, no less—to feel so much pain?

The novel arose out of West’s deep interest in Christianity and orthodox mysticism in particular. We see West’s fondness for the Anima Christi prayer in both of West’s first novels, which is modified in the latter by Miss Lonelyhearts’s editor as a plea from his readers to save them. Many parts of Balso Snell seemed inhabited by the Underground Man and Raskalnikov. Miss L is a kind of heathen Father Zossima who simply does not have the courage to prescribe the only remedy to pain, which is to embrace it. Most critics of the book reflect on Miss Lonelyhearts’s search for meaning and come to the conclusion that all modern attempts to give life meaning are, in the end, equally vain, and Miss Lonelyhearts’s late discovery of Christ is bound to let him and his readers down. But this is idle. Christianity does not claim to put an end to our sufferings; it opts, rather, to increase our sufferings and to give them meaning. One of the central claims of Christianity is that we must welcome suffering as Our Lord did. Intra tua vulnera absconde me.

We never quite find out if Miss Lonelyhearts is finally willing to take up his own cross. West is writing for moderns, and characteristic to modernity is our blind belief that our sufferings must have an antidote and that we might find it if we just give the wheels of progress a bit more time. If he hasn’t quite found peace, we can at least be assured Miss Lonelyhearts has awakened from this sleep.

Written during West’s time working as a screenwriting in California, Day of the Locust is his most brilliant novel. Published in 1939, it’s probably the greatest novel about Hollywood that will ever be written. We see in it all the shallowness and perversion, the whoring and exploitation, the mania and cultish stupidity we see in Harvey Weinstein’s Tinseltown. It is seething with hatred and bubbling with a repressed fury which, if West is correct, will someday boil over to consume us all.

The novel’s main character, Tod, has sacrificed his art school ambitions to move west and become a set designer. In the pecking order, he is somewhat above the extras who hope they might break a leg on set and collect a higher day’s wage. Tod seems more or less happy with his new life in California, though he is alienated from the greater part of the people and locales around him. He attends parties with other hacks where they mindlessly talk shop in between visits to Madame Jennings’s high-class brothel and watching French incest porn.

Tod is enamored with his neighbor, Faye, a young wannabe-starlet and sexpot who is confident her stardom is right around the corner. Unfortunately, in a town overrun by whores and hacks, no one else agrees. When she hits hard times after the death of her father, Tod asks Faye if he can pay her bills. She rejects him, opting instead to take a couple-weeks residency at Madame Jennings’s. When she has pocketed enough money to make rent, she returns to chasing her dream as if nothing has happened.

Having had his legitimate attempts at her rebuffed, Tod finally asks to purchase her wares. But Faye won’t give him more than a peck on the lips. Faye is one of the most repellent characters in American letters, yet her treachery is so subtle, and her motivations are so honest and plainly stated, that the reader can never really turn against her. What is nasty about her is also evident and honest, even to herself. Faye knows herself so well, and is so plainly what she is, that we cannot really feel sympathy for the poor saps who gladly fall across her path.

I can’t think of any passages which quite so brilliantly portray the impotent rage of unrequited desire. Not for a second are we allowed to completely dehumanize Faye; she actually takes on an almost spiritual character at the moments Tod wants her most when her dreams are at the fore when her beauty is most tangible. And yet he can’t have her, he can’t pin her down. And only one recourse is left: violent rape.

I also can’t think of another writer able to so coldly and so plainly allow our hero to contemplate the violent rape of a young woman. There are plenty of artists of alienation. Brett Easton Ellis can allow a character to contemplate a woman’s rape via gerbil, but he pulled this off simply because it is outrageous—the reader is meant to be shocked by this. But the reader is not greatly shocked by Tod’s lusts; we are not greatly alienated. We understand them, we are forced to empathize with them, even if we cannot find sympathy with Tod. Tod is simply too pathetic.

Yet Tod is not even the most pathetic of Faye’s hangers-on. This distinction goes to Homer (of all the last names in the world) Simpson, a former hotel manager from Waynesville, Iowa. His passions stoked by a non-sexual encounter with a prostitute, Homer moves to California for no good reason whatsoever. After taking the second house shown to him by the real estate agent, Homer spends his day sitting on a broken lawn chair, tending a lizard. There is so little in Homer’s life that normal feelings of loss and gain do not register with him. “Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, like Homer, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them. They know this. They usually know this, but still can’t help crying.”

In the midst of the whores, transsexuals, midgets and other assorted freaks populating West’s Los Angeles, Homer Simpson stands out as an emblem of perfect mediocrity, and in so being becomes a freak himself. He is a walking nothing, who exists for nothing but to be exploited. And yet the reader feels great pathos for him. Homer is not proud, not brave, not distinct. He is barely human, a faceless prole lost in the machine of industrial society. Yet he still exists, he still has a soul, thanks to West’s tremendous gifts. Modern writers have struggled to present nothingness to readers because, of course, the mere act of putting letters on a page betrays the purpose. Not to overuse the superlatives, but it is hard to think of any character quite as indistinct as Homer Simpson.

Following a span taking care of her dying father, Homer allows Faye to move in with him, rent-free, though when she finally makes it big, she promises to pay him back. Of course, this is pure unadulterated findom, pathetic in the fact that it is not exploitation, as both people are getting exactly what they want: Faye doesn’t have to whore herself at Mrs. Jennings’s to pay rent, and Homer is allowed to be in the near proximity of a woman.

Tod is also happy to have the one man more pathetic than himself looking over his love interest. It isn’t long before a pack of cowboys (and a Mexican, for good measure) start making advances. Homer actually allows the boys to live in his garage for a while (times are tough, says Faye) where they begin holding cockfights. It isn’t until Homer walks in on one of the cowboys pounding Faye that his suppressed anger finally boils over, and Faye hits the road. Tod finds Homer the next morning in a nearly comatose state. From there, Homer decides he’s going to return to Iowa, and his attempts to take the bus back home form the climax of the novel.

At this point of the story, we almost forget that we’re reading a novel about Hollywood. The tale of sexual frustration which takes up most of the middle of the novel contrasts with the scenes on set and in the hills. Yet what initially seems like a disparity, between Homer and Tod’s impotence and the larger structure of Hollywood, are not so far apart when we realize how dependent mass entertainment is on the forces of sexual desire and frustration. For Homer is just one of the millions of sad losers drawn to women like Faye. He may have a closer vantage point, but what difference is there between him and the man ogling her on the screen back in Waynesville? Mass media makes cuckolds of us all.

Throughout history, the effect of Jezebels and Delilahs were confined to a small area for a short time. There were only so many harlots to go around, and most of the time some man would find the courage to step up and put them back in their places. But the liberation of loose women, not only politically but more importantly through media, has distorted the eternal adversarial relationship between man and whore. A woman’s sway over men was usually limited to a social group; an actress was once confined to a particular geographic area. No more. What West saw in Hollywood is ever more apparent in our age, where every thot with an Instagram now has control over ten thousand pathetic Homer Simpsons.

Considering the modern obsession with portraying doomed romances, it is actually surprising how few authors portray the limitless authority women have over men. There are many wicked men, but women can become wicked simply by acting as women. Men must adopt some role to do evil, women can simply be themselves; women derive most of their power simply from being women. This is something Pip learned in Great Expectations, consoled only by the fact that tormenting Estella seemed to undergo some awareness of this after she had lost her power of attraction.

But for the most part, most authors are content to make even the most calculating woman a mere tool for men. Thus, Jay Gatsby and Dick Driver are not so much undone by female treachery as the fact that their women have simply chosen other (better) men. And Philip Roth—no stranger to misogyny—can only really condemn women when they are a “crazy” incarnation of his ex-wives. There’s too much to be lost by condemning female sexuality; one still has to worry about Michiko Kakutani’s review or, as in the case of Roth, luring female fans into bed.

West is immune from this. He captures the fact that many women don't care all that much when they ruin a man, and in fact seem to lack the faculty to do so. For all Faye’s strivings and manipulations, we don’t feel any more animus towards her than Homer (the poet, this time) did towards Helen on her return to Sparta. We cannot feel resentment against Helen; the harlot who spurred the carnage has been accepted home by husband and kind. Who are we to argue against her, if her slighted husband and countrymen will not? In the end, it was simply an affair between men. Yes, the affair concerned a woman, but soon enough it's water under the bridge. In a similar way, if Faye has no real animus in her actions, why should we have any towards her?

In Locust’s final scene, a continent’s-worth of unrequited desires finally clashes with the machinery meant to stoke them. Homer is preparing to take the bus home not far from a crowd of people who have begun to flock to a movie premiere. It is still hours before any celebrities show up, but no one in the crowd cares. They have nowhere else to be.

West’s apex as an author is in his description of the sad masses drawn from all of America, turning their eyes to celebrities as their last hope:

“All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the field and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover the sunshine isn’t enough. …There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a ‘holocaust of flame,’ as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.”

The last image of the book is of great violence leveled at a seven-year-old boy who is being groomed by his mother to be an androgynous answer to Shirley Temple. The confrontation between perverse titillation, impotent desire, and the mindless weight of the mob comes to a head. When I first read the ending, I thought perhaps West had become overwrought; thankfully, the recent mob in Philadelphia following a football victory reminds us that however much our modern rage is dampened by masturbation and videogames and antidepressants, the violence is still there, it is just uncertain as to how it will manifest itself.

Talking about West’s books, it’s hard not to slip into the modern vernacular of wagecucks, chads, thots, findom, etc. The novel almost serves as a weird mirror reflection of so much of the male angst we see in the digital age. It’s not that other novels don’t have their share of cucks, etc. But Homer is so archetypally and quintessentially a beta orbiter that it’s unfortunate his name has never become a synonym the way, e.g., Babbit was once synonymous with wagecuck. And Faye’s mix between idealism, cruel ambivalence, and happy stupidity makes her an e-thot in its most distilled form. Condensing his characters down to 4chan buzzwords may sound disparaging.

During his lifetime, West was never appreciated he should have been, and misfortunes plagued him with almost comic ferocity. The publisher of Miss Lonelyhearts, for example, went bankrupt right as positive reviews began to come in, and its creditors seized extra copies of the novel before they could hit bookstores. The rest of West’s life was similarly unfortunate. He passed up a young love because another woman seduced him—she was the first woman who asked him to sleep with her. The woman he eventually married was known for her promiscuity, and brought into their marriage a bastard toddler (to his credit, West was fond of his wife’s son). And just as West was finding true financial success as a screenwriter, a car crash killed him and his wife. Press F, lads.

But maybe West has finally found an era that can deliver him a genuine following. Perhaps we live in an era that can finally understand what West was trying to convey. Witness the minor adulation paid to the son of a Hollywood hack, who like Homer spent hours brooding on the Fayes of the world (when he wasn’t imagining his sister being railed by black guys) and left his own fair share of carnage in the Sunshine State. The poor bum—his memoirs might be letters to Miss Lonelyhearts. But in atomized America, “St. Eliot” had no due to pay, no role to fill, no use to anyone; he was too smart not to see through the perverse façade of modern society, yet too weak and too faithless to tear himself away from his Narcissistic image of himself.

Eliot Rodger didn’t know he was living in one of West’s novels. Modern life is at least slightly more bearable knowing the same is true of ourselves.

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 3 out of 5]

These stories are pretty intense in the drama and surreal in their delivery. I don't know if West is well known today, but I think readers should find a copy in their library and dust it off.

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, Balso Snell is slight, and might not have been intended for a wide audience, and yes, A Cool Million is unlike the near masterpieces that bookend it (because it's basically proto-Vonnegut, bitterly satirical and funny/sobering), but West's four-novel run in the 1930s is a delight to behold altogether. Miss Lonelyhearts (which I read earlier this year) and The Day of the Locust are the justly praised major works, moving investigations into artifice, alienation, and the limitations of communication. The ending of each is a crescendo of sorts, and will remain with me for a long time to come. West's writing is marvelously fresh, too - even the slang is easy to get the hang of - so it repeatedly surprised me to realize how fiercely West was piercing the so-called American Dream all those years ago.

Harold Bloom and John Hawkes directed me to these books, and I'm pleased I followed their lead.

[Tama · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Day of the Locust

Someone artless once said stories are a series of images, no-one remembers the words. What about Shakespeare? The story should be so effecting that people will quote parts of it. Your craft should be this powerful. In reading West’s scenes I allow them to pass as images. His telling isn’t more important than his scenarios. And even now it has a period quality it didn’t have when it was brand new. It has the benefit of a modern reader trying to put themselves in this 30s Hollywood space.

It’s not passing so easily all the time. But if your mind drifts while reading it and you still have orientation in the scene it’d be a waste of time to read back. Your mind drifted for a reason.

I pictured a Claudette Colbert brunette silent film type beauty—skinny and long—made more sense with the way she wore her clothes. I didn’t think that Faye Greener might look more like the cover image. She’s irritating the entire time but it fits better that she’s a Monroe type—by that I mean the joke of the men’s obsession is truer. Not to say Clara Bow couldn’t command as much interest (her voice was similar to Faye’s in my head). ‘Will Success Spoiler Rock Hunter?’ but depressing.

Saved this story for last. My order started with:

The Dream Life of Balso Snell

This ‘Balso Snell’ must draw the “‘1001 Nights’ parody” tag. I felt so smart for thinking that way. I probably assumed the average reader wouldn’t get it. (This was yesterday. I’m rethinking everything.)

I’m taking the “Walled-in fat girl” poem for a quote re: walled-in #nofuture kids.

Janet and Beagle’s story is moving me. Beagle maintains a credibility as a poet for being such a great writer. He writes melodrama as best as most melodramatic greats. It’s meta though. At this time this image of a past it actor foraging in a bin outside his old theatre muttering monologues of ‘Macbeth’ is a classic dramatic moment. Today it’s a strong and untouched image.

Nathanael West had this crazy idea that a woman’s hump could house a growing foetus. And it’s a result of her being dumped in a grandiose way that the foetus transferred.

The Darwin lines “Bromius! Iacchus!” And this segment as it is written and formatted feels like it’s likening itself to ‘Murder in the Cathedral.’ Divine that I’ve read and can reference that dated text. West is nowhere near as dated. Witty and referential himself. Playing on more than religion and theatrical conventions.

“Three minutes of rapture followed by a feeling of profound disgust” has me on West’s and his story’s side for good.

This scene is pure grovelling, it’s intellectualising desperation for sex:
In my bed, love, you will find new themes, new interpretations, new experiences. You will be able to judge for yourself whether love is only three minutes of rapture followed by a feeling of profound disgust, or the all-consuming fire, the divine principle, a foretaste of the joys of heaven? Come, Mary McGeeney, to bed and a new world.
And now, finally, we come to the Time-argument. Do not confuse what I shall say under this head with the theories so much in vogue among the metaphysicians and physicists, those weavers of the wind. My "Time" is that of the poets. In a little while, love, you will be dead; that is my burden. In a little while, we all will be dead. Golden lads and chim-ney-sweeps, all dead. And when dying, will you be able to say, I turn down an empty glass, having drunk to the full, lived to the full? Is it not madness to deny life? Hurry! Hurry! for all is soon over. Blown, O rose! in the morning, thou shalt fade ere noon. Do you realize the tune the clock is playing? The seconds, how they fly! All is soon over! All is soon overl Let us snatch, while yet we may, in this brief span, whose briefness merely gilds the bubble so soon destroyed, some few delights. Have you thought of the grave? O love! have you thought of the grave and of the change that shall come over your fair body? Your most beautiful bride - though now she be pleasant and sweet to the nose - will be damnably mouldy a hundred years hence. O how small a part of time they share, that are so wondrous sweet and fair. Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend before we too into the dust descend. Into the dust, Mary! Thy sweet plenty, in the dust. I tremble, I burn for thy sweet en-brace. Be not miserly with thy white flesh. Give your gracious body, for such a short time lent you. Give, for in the giving you shall receive and still have what you give. Only time can rob you of your flesh, I cannot. And time will rob you - it will, it will! And those who husbanded the golden grain, and those who flung it to the wind like rain…”
Here Balso threw himself to the ground beside his be-loved.
How did she receive him? At first, by saying no.”

She eventually gives into him and West writes an insane scatterbrained train of thought from her perspective:
“No, Balso, not tonight. No, not tonight. Nol I'm sorry, Balso, but not tonight. Some other time, perhaps yes, but not tonight. Please be a dear, not tonight. Please!
But Balso would not take no for an answer, and he soon obtained the following yeses:
Allowing hot breath to escape from between moist, open lips: eyes upset, murmurs love. Tiger skin on divan. Spanish shawl on grand piano. Altar of Love, Church and Brothel. Odours of Ind and Afric. There's Egypt in your eyes. Rich, opulent love; beautiful, tapestried love; oriental, perfumed love.”

This whole story of Balso’s was all for a fuck, and damn it was good.

Pigeon pecks at rust brown gate line at shit
A sign of danger both pigeons fly.
The other pigeon flies away from its friend and keeps flying from that rusty shit water/

This state of mind has a decent amount of paranoia. Like, with a strong gust of wind, imagining a large indiscriminate thing being carried by said wind into the back of my head. And thinking this isn’t unlikely, sitting on a public bench with nothing but skinny trees behind one. I kind of forget what I look like, out of sight out of mind, and start to think that I must have suffered so much entropy since I last saw myself—a assumption that there’s rapid deterioration at play—that my head will be a garbled mutated mess. But when I look in the windows I’m as handsome as I have been. This particular paranoia is perhaps a result of the new conceptualisation of time. How it seems more to move without me. Im no longer in time. Im just a living human.

Weird that I was perfectly normal last year.

[‘Balso Snell’ made me think ‘Day of the Locust’ would be great. As one denotes the opening piece in a collection to be the most important. As a portrait of 30s Hollywood it can’t be authentic. They’re caricatures. But as an aesthetic that’s kind of lost now (‘Babylon’ captures it way better than I would think ‘The Artist’ does, either way it’s an interesting society, perhaps they should be more depraved in ‘Locust.’?). I read every word of West’s stories closely so they are worth something—their time lock is valuable.]

Miss Lonelyhearts

These are Crumb women.

West’s writing, as ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ characters are being introduced—boozers and people with opinions—is as poetic as it gets. It doesn’t make one feel as they do when hit by something beautiful, but the craft West exhibits is beautiful. His metaphors are unpredictable and acute. His scenarios are endowed in irony from the start, and he doesn’t waste a word.

In my writings its come to a time where the scene nessecitated words that define as “childishly sexual” to be as close to my intentions. “Childishly sexual” are words used to describe an encounter with Lonelyhearts and Betty. I would’ve decided against the use of infantilising language in my work because I didn’t want to allude towards that taboo. When I read it in West’s book I got where he was coming from and didn’t think much on it, until I started thinking what I just wrote. But to most it probably wouldn’t stand out as too weird. Which is why I shouldn’t have felt guilty in putting such a simile to my own immature adult character.

[Miss lonely hearts adaptation where he regrets not giving sinful advice. In keeping to god the questions remained basic. He asks why he couldn’t have encouraged evil behaviour. And makes his readers and people eviller and more interesting, more his kind of people after getting bored with following the bible, or he twists the bibles words in a critique of religion and its interpretation.]

A Cool Million

deserves obscurity. Its source of comedy is life’s abuses. It doesn’t detail all of them but repeats many, mutilation and rape are constant. It’s not very tasteful and I could barely laugh the whole hundred pages. I was curious as to West’s point to it all. It’s political, it’s satire; but it’s not important. It’s not going to change the world—the political landscape becomes 100% American at the end (a joke because: that’s not possible, or, that’s what it is already), so it remains relevant I guess.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t often refer to the blurbs on book covers/jackets, but in this case, the lone blurb appearing on my edition of The Complete Works of Nathanael West is worth repeating: “…it needed only these 400 pages to fix West unshakably in our 20th Century literature.” [W.G. Rogers, syndicated literary critic of the 40s and 50s]

I first read these novels years ago, when I was a young teen (circa 1969), coming to grips with the dark side of things, learning to see in the world things that matched my personal angst. At the time, A Cool Million was the main attraction, a very pointed satire of the American Dream. The more realistic Miss Lonelyhearts was in stark contrast to the Ann Landers and Amy Van Buren advice columns I saw in the papers at the time, and I was pretty certain that neither sister ever felt like Miss Lonelyhearts the same crushing impotence/futility. Where had those miserable and abject people gone? Had there been sufficient prosperity since the 30s to wipe away the poverty and twisted, cruel relationships Miss Lonelyhearts confronted?

For my teenage self, Balso Snell was on par with the nonsense plays of Ring Lardner, just silly dada stuff, easily read, easily forgotten. However, Day of the Locust was an evocation of Hollywood that I knew from sepia photographs, with its bungalows, studio lots, boarding houses, and the platinum, soft-focus elegance of its stars. West’s portrait of strivers and lost souls was something from the past, and such a Hollywood didn’t exist any longer, now that the studio system no longer contractually enslaved its employees. Could someone like Homer Simpson really exist, a man so self-alienated and ignorant about sex? I understood that Homer was the kind soul dragged down by illusion, the same sort of illusion that brought the hordes seeking in Hollywood a reality it had fabricated.

These novels all held up in my re-reading, even Balso Snell with its surreal background and literature-bashing satiric impulses. Miss Lonelyhearts, as with all of West’s novels, exhibits a casual misogyny and racism, not necessarily the author’s, but very much a part of the times. The earnest shall not survive, and no good deed goes unpunished. These mordant lessons are overstatements, but they represent the experience of Miss Lonelyhearts and those whom he wishes he could help. The cruel sarcasm of his editor, Shrike, represents a brutal, hard-boiled realism. The novel makes of Miss Lonelyhearts a half-assed martyr to irresponsible goodness, and the reader is directed to steer some course between the two poles.

A Cool Million offers up a plenitude of events as Lemuel Pitkin attempts to make his fortune and his way in the world. It’s a cross between Candide and Horatio Alger, both defiantly refuted by the series of misfortunes that befall Lemuel. Pangloss is embodied in the figure of Shagpoke Whipple, former US President and former banker, who, fallen on tough times, avows providence and the American way will restore prosperity. As Whipple whips up the disaffected for his new grassroots revolution, Lemuel continues to try to serve him, though by this time he’s lost an eye, a hand, and a leg. His legacy of success is to die a martyr to Shagpoke’s vision of America as an endless fount of can-do self-enterprise, a symbol of the all-American boy. It’s a heavy-handed story, but deftly told, all of its many scenes briskly limned with just enough detail to evoke amplitude.

The Day of the Locust is another indictment of mass delusion, but unlike the American dream, it’s the Hollywood dream that is being skewered. The more-or-less grounded Tod Hackett is the principal character/observer, and all of the characters and events swirl around him, grist for his magnum opus, a Guernica-like depiction of a Hollywood riot, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” The novel is populated with grifters, drifters, low-lifes, down-and-outers, starry-eyed no-talents, freaks, and one representative innocent, Homer Simpson, whose failed quest for a steadfast, even virginal love is bound up with the fate of thousands of disillusioned souls who riot and overrun a Hollywood premiere. Even as an observer, Tod Hackett becomes embroiled in events, and his dazed revulsion at Homer’s violent eruption (echoed and magnified by the throngs making him a target of their own violence) becomes a scream that merges in the blare of a police siren.

All of these novels were written during the 1930s, and they offer the reader a glimpse of the zeitgeist, distorted with the same spirit that moved Daumier, Goya, and Degas in their darker, critical art. [West does a good job of setting out Tod Hackett’s bonafides as an artist who wants to make something of his experience in Hollywood, and that list of painters is a sample of his influences, which might easily have been West’s own.] West’s vision is devoid of lighter, salutary tones, but as a corrective influence—whether dealing with art, politics, Hollywood, or America—it forces a reckoning with any sort of Panglossian idealism.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m kinda on the fence as to how to rate Nathanael West. He was definitely something of an interesting character, to say the least. Although I’m not so sure he was really all that likeable as a person but this is really beside the point. His writing is in many ways worth noting but what little there is of it is extremely uneven in quality. However, in content he is at least fairly consistent. Overall, I feel he can be viewed primarily as a satirist and a rather bitter and sarcastic one, if not somewhat juvenile at times.

Regardless, he did manage to leave something of an impression in his short life. However, I have to wonder if it was the fact of his dying tragically in a car accident at the age of thirty seven that caused him his greatest fame or whether is was the fact that he was slightly ahead of his time in attacking the American Dream that causes people to keep him around. Maybe it’s a little of both?

All of West’s books sold poorly in his day and being strapped for cash he accepted a position as a screenwriter in Hollywood but never did anything of real note here other than a handful of second rate B-movies. I think the consensus about him is that had he lived longer he would have potentially written some great things. I sort of agree with this but rating a writer on “what if’s” is clearly not the best way to assess anyone.

This book collects all of his novels in one volume and he seems to have published little else outside of these. Foremost, I must warn all potential readers of this book that if one picks up this particular edition [and it seems to really be the only one out there] that under no circumstances should you read the introduction before reading these stories. It completely gives away nearly every plot and major event in each one of these novels. Its rightful place is at the end as an afterward but even then it’s not essential reading in my opinion. However, I may just be a tad on the bitter side over having the entire book ruined by an overly pretentious ass to be objective about it.

The first book included in this collection is “The Dream Life of Balso Snell.” This is a great big FU to all things literary. It is purposefully written badly and with overtly grandiose literary pretensions. West wrote this when he was in college and it shows his strong distaste for academia by mocking it mercilessly here. He was an extremely lousy but arrogant student and actually went through the trouble to forge his transcripts to get into school but once there he did nothing much at all but read. His influences in literature were primarily French surrealists such as Breton and Rimbaud and the British and Irish poets of the late 19th century, especially Oscar Wilde.

Take the absolute worst examples of all of these writers work together and you can get the gist of this particular piece. It was meant to offend everyone and everything and to make doubly sure that no one could mistake this intent all of the events in this book takes place in the ass of a Trojan horse. I’m sure to some degree it must have some merit but largely I was more thankful for its brevity, a mere 66 pages, than anything else. I recommend skipping it for last as a quirky novelty should you find yourself liking his other writing but not as an introduction to him.

Fortunately the rest of his writing here is nowhere near as bad as this and his second book “Miss Lonelyhearts” is largely considered by many to be his masterwork and I agree. In a cinematic sense, it has a frenetic 1940’s screwball comedy pace that makes for quick and entertaining reading. Although, at the same time, it often borders on David Lynchian-like uncomfortableness that finds a nerve and lingers there mercilessly. Fueled by nothing but regret, loneliness and alcohol, the “hero” of this story pens the advice column for a newspaper in hopes that it might lead to a column of his own. Instead, he becomes mired in the wasteland of horrific and very real complaints from hundreds of lost souls and ends up becoming one himself. Overall, despite having some talent and promise, his career and life are lacking in any real substance and in a misguided attempt to find some meaning in what he does he reaches out to personally help one particular writer to his Lonelyhearts column and subsequently everything takes a turn for the worst, absurdly and tragically so. This is not for everyone but if you like this sort of thing you are sure to find it poignantly haunting, as much as I did.

The third book, “A Cool Million” is something of a backwards step in this writers progression in my opinion. If he had followed in the footsteps of his previous book and wrote something original I think there might have been a strong case for thinking West was destined for greater things. Instead, he takes a shortcut and basically wrote a vicious parody of the ever-popular Horatio Alger stories of the day. He even lifts many details and passages directly from some of these so as to announce this fact very clearly in case you didn’t quite understand the point. He takes the optimistic tone and premise of these tales and just wrote the exact opposite of them, which in my opinion is almost like writing a connect the dots picture book where one sees the object before you even pick up a single crayon. There are really no surprises here.

The hero of this book is a steadfastly cheerful and positive but luckless youth that embraces the idea that although he is poor and without any advantages if he works hard and keeps his strong sense of morality he can achieve anything he want to in this country. Naturally, nothing of the kind happens to him in this book and this is essentially is a bawdy and risqué romp across the country and the life of this hapless and unfortunate lad. Con men, prostitutes and murdering rapists are all he really finds. That, and a growing collection of horrible physical disfigurements is his ultimate reward for having such naïve hopes and dreams. I’m sure this didn’t go down very well in his day and now in our hugely media saturated age it just comes across as being rather campy and old fashioned. If one has ever read Horatio Alger’s books, then there might be some appreciation for the craft of deconstruction here as well as the unrelenting stomping the hero receives just out of spite for these ever cheerful fairy tales by Alger but otherwise it just seems pathetic and sad. At least to me it did.

The last book here, “The Day of the Locust” marks a huge shift in the style of writing of this author. In fact, each of these books shows a great variance from one to another in many ways that speaks of a chameleon quality of this writer. I have a feeling he did this effortlessly too. For, he seems to have worked harder at not working than much else his entire life. For me, this is one indication of just how much innate talent this man may have possessed. Had he only really applied himself at it he could very well have been undeniable. What if…

This last book seems to be his first step in this perceived direction of his worth. Here, one can sense a greater depth and reality to the setting and characters despite largely being comprised of two-dimensional caricatures and stereotypes. Clearly, this gives away the fact that this book is partly based on real people and events…but only so far. Nevertheless, the strength and assuredness of his writing somehow gives more life to these half-formed creatures of his.

However, I find the construction of this book a little choppy and disconnected at times but the occasional poetic moments found here kept my interest. Like in all of his books, none of the characters here are likeable but some are at the very least sympathetic ones. The hero in this book vaguely recalls that of the one in “Miss Lonelyhearts,” in that although he is jaded and cynical himself he finds a perverse desire to want to help others from time to time but most often inappropriately and at all the wrong times.

Published in 1939, I believe this is the first time Hollywood was ever been portrayed as starkly and unflatteringly as it is here. However, despite having an insider’s knowledge of this world and choosing to write about movie stars, directors and producers he focuses mainly on those inhabiting the periphery of this world that desire to be a part of this dream life but find themselves harshly excluded. This alone makes the novel something worthy of note.

Although, in my opinion, it is the ending of this novel that is ultimately the whole reason why you should read this all the way through. It is a powerful and surreal chapter that resonates strongly with some rather hard truths concerning American society in what are still relevant today. He rises above his normal abilities here and amazingly captures the many layered differences as well as the overall essence of a crowd in the midst of a riot. Truly stunning!

All in all, one can find many complaints with the man’s writing, mostly his callous view of humanity that includes bleak portrayals of racism, sexism and violence. Of course, he is a satirist at heart and one that did not shy away from the ugly aspects of life but was invariably drawn to it. Literary critics have also found Christian allegories within his work but I leave this to the theology scholars. Overall, as there would seem to be an overarching purpose and aim in this slumming in the human gutter I find that he does not offend me in the slightest. Of course, I like Bukowski and Celine so other people’s reaction may differ. Regardless, on the whole I feel he is definitely worth discovering and if one has the patience to look even shows himself to have a few redeeming qualities as well.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

p.45 "At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost that belief, they lost everything."
p.65-6 "He realised that his present sickness was unimportant. It was merely a trick by his body to relieve one more profound."
p.87 "Psychology has nothing to do with reality nor should it be should for motivation."
p.162 "Having lost faith in himself, he thought it his duty to undermine the nation's faith in itself."
p.213 "The heavy noonday sun hit directly on his face, beating down on him like a club. He hardly felt its blows, however."
p.316 "The inevitability of death has always given me pleasure."

A wide-ranging collection of genres of stories from one author. Although the collection represents all of the novels from the author, the writing ideas explored within the stories portray an impressive array of story types. The stories range from representative fiction, as in the case of The Day of the Locust, to silly satire, as in the case of A Cool Million. A Cool Million is packed with absurdities and comedy; it continues to walk the satiric story line through a trove of over-the-top situations, speeches, and setbacks. The character Skagpole Whipple, what a name, is the mouth piece of the inversions and perversions with the novel. In fact, there are wild characters featured in a couple of the stories who bloviate in strange send ups. Shrike, in Miss Lonelyhearts, becomes the author's focus for presenting fantastic rants about society and individuals. In addition to Shrike's savage blusterings, the letters to Miss Lonelyhearts imitate stream-of-consciousness writing, as a fun writing exercise, as an attempt to show a low level of education. Overall, there is an impressive level of writing throughout the stories, substantially exceeding the expectations for this reader.

[Geoff Wooldridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of four relatively short stories or novellas which cover the major works of Nathanael West (born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein), originally published separately in the 1930s.

Of the four stories, the one I preferred most was Miss Lonelyhearts, the tale of a man writing a popular newspaper column under this pseudonym, offering advice to the lovelorn, the lonely and those down on life. The man, who is never referred to by any other name in the narrative, is frustrated and lonely himself, and would prefer to engage is a less superficial style with the people seeking his help.

A Cool Million is a sad tale of misfortune, told in a staccato, almost comic book style, totally unrealistic in the scenarios it portrays, and which seems to pay some homage to cheap western novels. It is quite racist in many respects.

The Day of the Locust (the longest story) is a bizarre and nihilistic portrayal of people connected to the film industry, a set of characters with dreams and aspirations that they have no hope of achieving or even any clue how to go about finding success. One of the most disturbing aspects of this story was that one of the characters, a poor schmuck destined to be one of life's perpetual losers, was called Homer Simpson.

The final story (but the first originally published), called The Dream Life of Balso Snell, is a surrealistic ramble that makes very little sense at all. It was mercifully short.

Overall, this is a mixed bag by a reasonably unique American writer, worthy of a notable place in literary history for his original style and unusual perspectives of 1930s America. But there are plenty of other American writers that I prefer over Nathanael West.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

"He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven."

Muscular, manly prose describes the heartache of the weary world and its suffering in each of these Great Depression era stories.

There was something interesting to each of the novellas:

- In Miss Lonelyhearts, the psychological and religious fever dream that torments its protagonist as a result of the agony aunt letters he receives. What at first comes across as boredom at the many letters from people who are barely hanging on masks his compassion and impotence, which causes his desperate alcoholism.

- In A Cool Million, the language of Tom Jones, of the picaresque, but most of all the pastiche of Candide, as the narrative tears apart the American Dream with brutal, Voltairian flairs of grotesque violence. After just 10 pages it becomes hard to read because the sufferings of the hero are so pitiful.

- The LA-set Day of the Locust has found the most perfect metaphor for the failed promise of the American Dream. Less trippy than Miss Lonelyhearts, the dreamscape here is not mental but physical, built upon Hollywood fantasies of glamour and stardom. It opens with a marauding Napoleonic army - or at least a marauding army of actors playing Napoleonic soldiers. The main characters confuse the roles they play - cowboy, physical comedian, starlet - with who they really are, till their personalities become subsumed. The climax of the hysterical fans waiting for their silver screen idols sent shivers down my back.

[Nico Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This might be the only book I've ever read because I saw the film first... except when the Star Wars novelisation when I was 9 years old. This is very much better! If you can get past the casual racism and the bitterly casual way that some characters mention the concept of rape. Each novel has a cracked flavour of madness running through them with the Life of Baso Snell feeling the most unhinged. I need to go back to this again, before I can give my full opinion. Oh, and if you do get a chance to watch The Day of the Locust I heartily reccomend it if you enjoy downbeat 70s cinema- it reminded me alittle in tone of Lina Wertmuller's brilliant 7 Beauties.

[Donald Powell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very unhappy with this book. It was a distorted creation of characters and circumstances to spell as much hopelessness, dysfunction and misery as possible. It reminded me of a demented comic book more than meaningful literature. While there are loose associations to greed, crime, cruelty and prejudice, it was so overdone and simplistic it was meaningless to me. Some reviews referred to its a parody or caricature. In my view this was giving it too much credit for a bitter distortion to invoke hopelessness.

[Gareth Griffiths · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading the reviews it is amazing to see how everyone disagrees as to the worth of each of the four short stories. This shouldn't be surprising though as each has such a distinct character they could have been written by four different authors.

My personal recommendation is to not miss A Cool Million. The other three stories I could happily have skipped. But isn't it great when we all find something different to appreciate in what is a collection of only 4 works?

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man, Nathanael West has a lot of scathing critiques of a lot of things. Art, religion, the American dream and Hollywood all get a pretty good going over in these works. West is pretty readable, often insightful, and somewhat humorous. It's interesting to see resentment from an artist writing at the height of the Depression. I was expecting quite that degree, though I don't read much from the 30's.

[Cinderella · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story I actually finished reading here was “The Day of the Locust.” There’s some very interesting themes and ideas about Los Angeles and the promise of Hollywood and stardom in 1930s America, but through a darker view expressed through its characters. I’m curious about the other stories in this collection and will go back to them some time later.

[jo :)]

just didn’t like it. was compared to amazing authors and was not on par for sure. don’t know what people see in this writing but it’s missing for me. was satirical writing that never made me laugh. reading should be enjoyable even if tough themes sometimes. best thing i could relate to it was boy locker room talk, not my cup of tea.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could not understand the satire. If I were to read this again, I would need more than a book club to get me through. I definitely noticed the difference between how this and modern satire is written. It made me wonder if years from now people will struggle to read something I found relevant.

[Gregg Wingo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Complete Works of Nathanael West is made up of four novellas/novels dating from the 1930s. Each work is surrounded by the darkness of the Great Depression and the accompanying human misery. But they are not works of protest but rather studies in the human condition.

His first novel, "The Dream Life of Balso Snell" is a Kafka-esque journey through the anal track of the Trojan Horse. It is a bitter work attacking Art and the base desires of the Artist. It is West's indictment of Western Civilization as merely the arrogance of Man.

His second and in many ways most successful novel is "Miss Lonelyhearts". To date it has been adapted as a Broadway play and three films (the most recent in 1983). It is a brutal look at the world before Women's Liberation and birth control, and many other issues of misogyny and hard times. Miss Lonelyhearts is not Dear Abby but a male reporter tortured by his advice column and his readers' fates. In this age of revived misogyny and racism, this novel is a visceral reminder of the way we were:

"Dear Miss Lonelyhearts --

I am in such great pain I dont know what to do sometimes I think I will kill myself my kidneys hurt so much. My husband thinks no woman can be a good catholic and not have children irregardless of the pain. I was married honorable from our church but I never knew what married life meant as I never was told about man and wife. My grandmother never told me and she was the only mother I had but made a big mistake by not telling me as it dont pay to be inocent and is only a big disapointment. I have 7 children in 12 yrs and ever since the last 2 I have been so sick. I was operatored on twice and my husband promised no more children on the doctors advice as he said I might die but when I got back from the hospital he broke his promise and now I am going to have a baby and I dont think I can stand it my kidneys hurt so much. I am so sick and scared because I cant have an abortion on account of being a catholic and my husband so religious. I cry all the time it hurts so much and I dont know what to do.

Yours respectfully,
Sick-of-it-all"

I actually started reading Mr. West because of his third novel "A Cool Million". It is about an ill-fated New Englander, Lemuel Pitkin. However, the attraction for me was the Huey Long-inspired character Shagpoke Whipple. The novel is a parody of the endless Horatio Alger stories that have fueled the profits of publishing houses for centuries. It is a burlesque critique of Capitalism, Americanism, and Fascism to the point that it lost in slapstick. But West's novel allows us to understand the attraction of pastiche fascism in our own time: "...this country was delivered from sophistication, Marxism, and International Capitalism....its people were purged of alien diseases and America became again American."

West's last novel, "The Day of the Locust" captured my attention to the fullest. It is the American John the Baptist of the Hollywood System that Evelyn Waugh's Sermon on the Mount, "The Loved One", is for the British emigre film community. While Waugh is a satirical Dr. Watson, West is firmly of the Raymond Chandler noir detective tradition. Both capture the oppression and libertine nature of the old studio system and its sideshow of wannabees. For those of us who have lived or visited LA we know the sense of hope and failure that surrounds the film industry. West also reminds us that before Florida and Arizona, California was the land of retirement paradise and lingering death:

"All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn't enough. They get tired of oranges, even avocados pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don't know what to do with their time. They haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn't any ocean where most of them came from, but after you've seen one wave, you've seen them all....Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing."

Like Jesus, West died tragically at the height of his success and in his late 30s. His body of work is, in the words of Alan Ross, "a sort of pessimistic Messianism" for America, a dirty and crippled America of glorious potential. I strongly recommend the Four Gospels of Nathanael West.

[Greyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Partial DNF--Got through Balso Snell and Miss Lonelyhearts. Both about as acerbic as anything that has ever been put to paper. Will pick it up again at a later date to finish off A Cool Million and Day of the Locust.

[Aoife]

Miss Lonelyhearts: "Turning back to his desk, he picked up a bulky letter in a dirty envelope. He read it for the same reason that an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain."

Nathanael West is pretty good at hurting the pain

[Mark Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miss Lonelyhearts - 5 stars
A Cool Million - 5 stars
The Day of the Locust - 4 stars
The Dream Life of Balso Snell - 2 stars

[Larry Singleton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just a disclaimer: I only read the first novel in this collection. I thought it was okay, but I didn’t finish reading the whole collection because I found his writing boring overall.

[Dave · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nothing redeeming about this author could be found in any of the four tales. Bloom dropped a full measure in my estimation for trying to rehabilitate this 'writer' who does not deserve to be read

[Sandra Gornall · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Day of the Locust - 4
Miss Lonelyhearts - 3

[Stephen Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

Strange little stories. At times unreadable

[Ellie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Miss Lonelyhearts: I feel sick, I skim read the end.

[Russell Bittner · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Moooompitcher yaaaah. Oh I never hoped to know the passion, the sensuality hidden within you – yes, yes. Drag me down into the mire, drag. Yes! And with your hair the lust from my eyes brush. Yes … Yes … Ooh! Ah!” (p. 61).


‘Nough said (or cited) about The Dream Life of Balso Snell, the first of four short novels in Nathanael West’s Complete Works. West was young at this point, just starting out, and quite enamored of words – or at least of the sound of them – not to mention of the procreative act. But hey, who isn’t – or wasn’t – at that age? (West was twenty-eight when, in 1931, this novel was published in a limited edition.)


Miss Lonelyhearts is a whole ‘nother story.


Upon reading the second letter addressed to the columnist of The New York Post-Dispatch – a columnist who calls himself ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ and who dispenses advice and comfort to tortured readers’ souls – I was suddenly reminded of the ever-so-poignant conclusion of Herman Melville’s brilliant novella, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”


Perhaps the following citation (from Miss Lonelyhearts to his sometimes-girlfriend, Betty) will shed some light on my spontaneous – and possibly erroneous – comparison of the two stories: “‘Let’s start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator’” (p. 106).


Both the plot and the language of Miss Lonelyhearts flow back and forth rather seamlessly between surrealistic and hyper-realistic – and then the novel ends on a note that is a combination of both. This little story is definitely not for those readers who are prone to seasickness or vertigo!


Next up is A Cool Million. I’m frankly not able to devise a better descriptor for this novel than ‘weird.’ Published at the exact midpoint (1934) of the Great Depression, it is, I suppose, an attempt to turn the Horatio Alger myth on its head. And while I’m quite sympathetic to any writer who would attempt to explode that myth, I’m not altogether certain that Nathanael West’s hyperbolic prose achieves his desired end.


From the mouth of Shagpoke Whipple, former President of the United States (sic!), we have the following on p. 150: “‘America,’ he said with great seriousness, ‘is the land of opportunity. She takes care of the honest and industrious and never fails them as long as they are both. This is not a matter of opinion, it is one of faith. On the day that Americans stops believing it, on that day will America be lost.’”


Couple the above with the following exchange on p. 214 between Lemuel Pitkin, the ‘hero’ of our story, and his would-be childhood sweetheart, Betty Prail, whose own course through life proves to be almost as disastrous as Lemuel’s: “‘Well,’ interrupted Lem, a little ashamed of having submitted that he was discouraged. ‘I left Ottsville to make my fortune and so far I’ve been to jail twice and lost all my teeth and one eye.’


‘To make an omelette you have to break eggs,’ said Betty. ‘When you’ve lost both eyes, you can talk.’”


And finally, the only novel of Nathanael West I’d previously read – and the one that drew me to this collection: The Day of the Locust….


For the “best of West,” please consider the following opening paragraph – but with my recommendation that you read the entire first chapter to get a better feel for what this author can do when he’s on target: “Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office. The groan of leather mingled with the jangle of iron and over all beat the tattoo of a thousand hooves. He hurried to the window.”


The setting for this first paragraph is not a war zone or a racetrack. It’s Hollywood. And West exposes Hollywood for what it was and is. The picture is not pretty.


I wish I could give Nathanael West more than three stars. Unfortunately, I can’t. Had he lived longer, he might’ve become a more disciplined writer. He didn’t. He died at the age of 37.


RRB
08/30/14
Brooklyn, NY

[Randy Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

For my 50th book of 2020 (yay me!) I decided to push myself beyond a single work of fiction and to consider West's entire body of work. I had read, 'The Day of the Locust' several times and considered it one of the greatest novels of the 20th century but had not read the others. I wondered if that work would be more revealing having read the previous novels. That turned out to be true. There is a grotesque quality and pitiless sensibility to the earlier works that continues into 'Day of the Locust' but there is great vulnerability that isn't as prevalent earlier on too.

While I've heard 'Miss Lonelyhearts' called out by some as West's greatest work, I don't agree. The premise of the books is that Miss Lonelyhearts is the columnist who answers the letters of the miserable that get reprinted in the newspaper. There is a focus on the pathos of the individual in that work which is unique in fiction. The condensation of human misery those letters contain makes for tremendous power. While a novel might contain several characters where that misery is clearly communicated, in Lonelyhearts it is clear that the reality of each letter reflects multiples of misery that gets at an aspect of humanity we can barely acknowledge. But the exploration of that quality doesn't engage West's wonderful imagination like Locust does. The third of his novels, 'A Cool Million' was wonderfully prescient but less a novel than a horrific fable. The first novel, 'The Dream Life of Balso Snell' was a slight affair with some vivid and promising passage but little more.

For me, all of these slight novels are mere warm-up for 'The Day of the Locust.' None of the other novels have any vivid characters. A few are interesting but not memorable. There is one scene in Locust which involves three great characters who don't let the other ones crowd them out. This is an amazing feat. If a writer is lucky he or she gets one character to stand out in a scene. Perhaps a writer manages to get two characters to hold their own but for all three characters to remain equally memorable? I can only think of the scene in Locust that starts with Harry Greener knocking on Homer Simpson's front door only to fall sick and ending with the reluctant rescue by daughter Faye.

The other amazing thing about the book is that glitzy, all-consuming Hollywood doesn't steal the show. This isn't a novel about Hollywood even as it takes place in Hollywood among film people. But Real Hollywood, the land of directors making great films or movie stars titillating us with their tedious excesses, doesn't get a word in edge-wise. This is the world of sad, poverty stricken people barely scraping by. They don't see themselves that way but we are struck by the limited imagination that people in the land of make-believe possess. Only our narrator, Todd Hackett, uses his art to imagine the future and that future is his painting in progress, 'The Burning of Los Angeles.'

[Kassandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to assign a rating to a collection whose constituent parts are so widely variable. In descending order of worth:

Miss Lonelyhearts - Tour de force. Five stars. Given its novella length, to describe it would be to spoil it.

Day of the Locust - Somehow combines, in embryonic, chimeric form, the genres of Hollywood satire, hard-boiled noir, and Depression-era social commentary in a way that places it into a kind of retrospective, Fichtean trinity in which "The Grapes of Wrath" figures as thesis, this book stands as the antithesis, and Dos Passos's "U.S.A." trilogy comes in as the synthesis. Four stars (one knocked off for gratuitous rape fantasies). Deserves to be remembered as far more than the source for the name "Homer Simpson".

A Cool Million - Had some promise as a parody of Horatio Alger. (One might wonder whether Horatio Alger is still in need of parody, but many people, including the governor of the state where I live, seem to still believe in that kind of fable.) However there are some things that can no longer be read in an omniscient narratorial voice without doing lasting damage to the story. For example, "Wu Fong was confident that he would soon have his six hundred dollars back with interest, for many of his clients were from non-Aryan countries and would appreciate the services of a genuine American. Apropos of this, it is lamentable but a fact, nevertheless, that the inferior races greatly desire the women of their superiors. This is why the Negroes rape so many white women in our southern states." (p. 169) Could not continue reading beyond that point, and thus, one star.

The Dream Life of Balso Snell - Whether intended as a mimicry or a parody of some of the worst of high modernism, the result is sophomoric exercise that West would have done better to leave in his desk drawer. One star.

Given present-day publishing practices, it is unlikely that works as short as "Miss Lonelyhearts" or "The Day of the Locust" would be issued in their own bindings anymore. Rather than fall prey to the completist fallacy, one wishes that publishers interested in bolstering his reputation and profiting thereby would therefore issue these two--perhaps together with some good critical essays that would, among other things, help point readers to later writers influenced by West.