Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West

Can you be moved by 59 pages of text?

Yes, you can. I can, at least. For years, I have had that standard copy of Miss Lonelyhearts paired with The Day of the Locust. My father gave it to me long ago so I could read Locust, and despite having that story referenced repeatedly throughout my college career, I could just never read the damn thing. I started to, a couple of times, but just never kept going. Sometimes, with books, it's a complete mood thing. That's why I stopped reading Falling Man and Gravity's Rainbow partway through. Not because I was bored or frustrated, or because the quality was poor. Just because I need to be in the right head space.

Well, Friday I was in the right head space for Nathanael West. So I took up the book and read it on public transit. I didn't get to The Day of the Locust, ironically, because I thought maybe part of the reason I could never read the story was that I always felt as though I were cheating by opening a book to its middle instead of its beginning. Miss Lonelyhearts was a truly splendid treat. I even quote it in my sidebar, now -- look to your right.

The eponymous character is a pseudonym for an advice columnist. People write in to him asking for advice, and he doles it out under this cute nom de plume, trying to give heart to people whose lives are suffocating under layers of shit. Examples of these letters, their desperately human pleading and horrific grammar intact, are included in the narrative, and help you understand the changes that Miss Lonelyhearts goes through.

This story made me yearn for time periods like the 1940s, when it was perfectly okay for an author to write using directly religious language. At this stage of book production and marketing, as well as the political climate, such a style would be unheard of -- it would pigeonhole you as a certain "type" of author with a certain "type" of subject or audience. But this unabashed use of Christ and religious ideas is not offensive or divisive in anyway. Miss Lonelyhearts works for a newspaper after all, and if there's a more godless place in the universe, it probably has a lovely view of a lake of fire.

Miss Lonelyhearts is, through his job, directly confronted with the suffering of all people, on all levels of society. Their problems are real, and they inspire despair, pity, and anger in him. This story tracks his attempts to try and find a kind of inner peace, or solidarity, amongst not only the chaos of his readers' lives, but the chaos of his own. He eventually likens himself to a rock, and the insane drunken antics of others to a raging ocean.

However, his "rockness" also makes him blind to what drives others, what creates and fuels their misery, and this is eventually his downfall. By denying the undulating humanity of his own spirit, he fails to recognize the way it functions in others, and this leaves him incredibly vulnerable to attack. After all, a rock is initially unaffected by the sea, but eventually the relentless pounding of the waves will wear that rock down to nothing. It will, no matter its solidarity, be absorbed into a dramatic, repetitive, futile process.

The sea is one of my favorite things to personify, so for Miss Lonelyhearts to conceive of himself as a rival to the sea rang so many analytical bells in my mind that it made my head hurt.

There is a real moral at the heart of this story, leaving the quote I have at the right as a bit of a conundrum. Is it deluded or noble to strive for order in a world bound for chaos? Do we, as Chaucer's Nun's Priest (I think, I don't remember The Canterbury Tales very well, for shame) would tell us, only rational to give in to the irrational, or is a central tenet of fascist-leaning philosophies more practical -- try to control the "nasty, short, and brutish" tendencies of man and you will succeed?

Maybe not for everyone, but for me, this book raised valid philosophical questions about how to live in a world full of suffering and pain, where the suffering is impossible to laugh at or shrug off. How can someone in the modern world succeed if they develop compassion? Is Miss Lonelyhearts some kind of journalistic Big City martyr? And if so, what does that mean about contemporary living, or modern-day interpretations of age-old martyrs' tales?

I should have found a way to study this story in college, but all anyone ever talked about was Locust. It's things like that that lead to fanciful day dreams of myself as a professor.