‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ by Nathanael West

Fiction – Kindle edition; Green Light Press; 108 pages; 2011.

I’m quite a sucker for books written or set during the Great Depression. Nathanael West’s novella Miss Lonelyhearts, published in 1933, fits into this category, but I’m afraid it didn’t really tickle my fancy.

This dark and comic tale about an agony aunt on a Manhattan newspaper is described in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die as an “interesting examination of the problematic role of Christianity in the modern world”. But for me, it serves as a warning to be careful of what you wish for.

The Miss Lonelyhearts of the title is a young, fervently religious man eager to be a success. He eagerly takes the newly created newspaper job answering people’s personal problems even though many of his colleagues regard it as a joke. He takes a more pragmatic, long-term approach, seeing it as a mere stepping stone to something more desirable at a later date. Perhaps it might even win him Brownie points with God.

His column would be syndicated and the whole world would learn to love. The Kingdom of Heaven would arrive. He would sit on the right hand of the Lamb.

But over time he comes to realise that the job is not a joke; that he has an important role to play in the moral and spiritual welfare of those who write to him seeking advice.

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.

If this makes the novella seem horribly righteous, let me assure you that it is not. It’s profoundly dark in places, littered with references, many of them euphemistic, to sex and sexual practices, and there’s a menacing undercurrent of misogyny running throughout (I was shocked by several references to women in “need of a good rape”).

Miss Lonelyhearts is not the angelic young man he strives to be. Desperate to be seen as a man of honour, he asks his long-suffering girlfriend to marry him, only to keep avoiding her for weeks on end. He also develops unwise attachments to troubled readers but doesn’t seem to be able to extricate himself from complicated, unethical relationships. Indeed, he’s everything you would not want an agony aunt to be.

Some people might find humour in these situations, but this kind of comedy is lost on me. The saving grace is that Miss Lonelyhearts is short and takes just a matter of hours to read; I might have begrudged a longer book for wasting my time.

This is my 9th book for #20booksofsummer. I bought it on 9 February 2012, but not sure what provoked me to do so. Maybe it was the price (77p!) or the idea it was about someone working on a newspaper and therefore might fall into my “journalism novel” category.

‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ by Nathanael West, first published in 1933, is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, where it states that “the protagonist’s lack of empathy for his readers exposes his failures to emulate Christ, while the extent to which suffering believers are able to confess their darkest secrets and fervent requests in the prayer of their letters is diminished to a function of the journalism market”.