The Day of the Locust (1939)

I must say it was a little distracting to return to Nathanael West's great novel for the first time since the '70s and encounter a schlubby character named Homer Simpson (he was played by Donald Sutherland in the 1975 movie directed by John Schlesinger, which is not to be missed). The mystery deepens as it appears Matt Groening has pointed to it as one source of his cartoon character's name. Yeah, right. It was also hard to get an image out of my mind from Jonathan Lethem's introduction, pointing out the vertical lines of West's Miss Lonelyhearts, set in New York City in the early '30s, and the horizontal lines of The Day of the Locust, set in Los Angeles in the late '30s. Finally, just to give some indication of how fully packed this little novel is, the biblical locust story is wrapped in to pretty much every single incident of the action, and in many ways explains everything in this strange litany of episode: the landscape is blighted and dead many different ways, not least in the psychic dimension, overrun by soulless feeding lost people, the late arrivals and still pouring in to Southern California's paradise. Between the time of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, one of the most devastating environmental disasters in American history deepened to catastrophic levels, with the advance of the Dust Bowl. John Steinbeck of course has one vision of the aftermath in The Grapes of Wrath. West has another here—one that is much closer to (yet infinitely intensifies) Horace McCoy's 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a companion novel to The Day of the Locust if ever there was one. By the time the streak of violence in West's novel has erupted into a closely described cock fight and finally explodes into a riot in Hollywood for glimpses of the attending stars at a movie premiere, there is a kind of satisfaction that occurs, a fitting resolution to the burden of dread and anxiety and anomie we live with on a daily basis. It's realistic too, in terms of the beneficial side of catharsis, which after all may be unpleasant in the actual moment but ultimately cleansing, so cleansing. The Day of the Locust is packed full of random incidents, but the elements linger and cohere, chillingly, long after the book has been put down.

In case it's not at the library.

Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

We never actually learn the name of the journalist who has been assigned the Miss Lonelyhearts column in Nathanael West's strange and very short novel. He is referred to only as "Miss Lonelyhearts" and thus even the narrator participates in the constant ridicule he is subjected to. It's the deepest part of the Depression and Miss Lonelyhearts just needs a job, so he has taken the gig. But he suffers sympathetically with the suffering in the letters that pour into the newspaper for him daily. That's all. He prowls the hard streets of New York City, that most modern of all metropolises, not quite yet dragging himself through Allen Ginsberg's negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, but that's where he's headed. He has to take what he can get for employment, a young man trying to establish himself, and what he gets is a basketful of pain. He suffers, not least from being the fortunate one in a sea of misery, the miserable one who knows he is fortunate. As comedy, as intended, the fundamental situation never changes. Doing nothing is impossible—Miss Lonelyhearts is too naïve and idealistic still, too young and callow—but doing anything only makes everything worse. And so it goes, occasionally "relieved" by passages from the letters he receives, reads, responds to, and ultimately flirts with oblivion to get away from. The letters bring news of humanity's sad wellsprings ongoing. Going on today still, 80+ years and counting, as they no doubt will be in 800+ years and counting, if humanity can survive its follies, which presently looks doubtful. I like the compressions of West best of all. This novel moves so quickly and at such acute angles it's easy to miss the fathomless depths it sits atop. In that way it reads to me more of a piece with the invention of pulp noir that was then taking place, with the work of William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett, combining formal structural experiments with a pebbly hard narrative stream of headlong momentum. James M. Cain did not just come out of nowhere, of course. At the same time, no one else seemed even close to West's ability to look into the abyss, suffer the psychological damage, and attempt to report back, the witness to "victims burnt at the stake, signaling through flames." Overall, the recourse to Antonin Artaud is not inapt for this dark little funny book.

In case it's not at the library.