Nathanael West Books

I absolutely adored this charming tale! It is a delightful children's story that is perfect for any family that has experienced the anxiety of introducing a new baby into the home - and who with more than one child hasn't experienced that? This is truly a wonderful read for all ages.

I felt this book was cute and simple at the same time. The illustrations are in a unique quick draft style. This book leaves something to the imagination because of its simplicity. My only complaint was that because I bought it directly from Amazon, there was an enormous amount of packaging for such a light and thin book. However, that is no reflection to the quality and enjoyment I had when reading this book. Also, being from Brooklyn allowed me to appreciate this story more.

I think this book is hilarious, original and an excellent way to introduce your child to the idea of a new sibling coming home.

West is only fairly judged by the breadth of his work. He has a special view of human nature and all its weaknesses.

This is an excellent, well-written exposition relating to the important role General Nathanael Greene played in the American Revolution. Greene was an overlooked, but absolutely key leader, who was given the difficult task of preventing the British from winning the South. Due to extreme circumstances, Greene was needed for his ability to employ a "guerilla" style of warfare. At that time, 1780-82, there were no understood rules concerning this type of warfare - Gen. Greene had only his wits, and humility (he had to accept that he would win no Great Victories) to guide him. As it turned out, he was the man for the job, and this small, readable book captures the similarities between Greene, a tyro at this, and Mao in China, and Gen. Giap in Vietnam, who had decades of theory to draw on, 160+ years later. An important addition to our understanding of the best leaders of the Revolution.

...that is, unless someone (say, an English Lit professor, one of that nefarious cabal whose mission is to take young minds, and suck out of them all enthusiasm for, and pleasure in, reading) is making you do it.

These two stories can stand on their own, without anyone's help. They're that good.

I sincerely wish everyone knew West's name. That man could write. It's been almost 35 years since I read these stories in college, but I still remember them and how they affected me.

Wow. Much like Paul Bowles, this author takes no prisoners. May I suggest that you be in a stable frame of mind before reading this novel, lest it prove to be one unsettling factor too many for you. I found myself to be none too comfortable to be counted as a member of the human race at the end of this book. Written at about the same time as Raymond Chandler's early novels and set in the same real estate, The Day of the Locust is about five times as sordid. It is totally original and totally unpredictable, except for the scent of doom that pervades it from the opening page. You know that the author was writing about what he saw. Los Angeles and Hollywood were rotten seventy years ago. What must they be like now? West covers so much ground, with such economy, and it's all so readable. This devastating work is a remarkable achievement. What a staggering loss that Nathanael West died so young. And what a surprise to find Homer Simpson hiding out in such a fine novel. Highly recommended.

I wish there was a rating under one star. I'm supposed to read this for a class, but, in rare fashion, I doubt that I will finish the novel. I realize this is supposed to be surreal, but must I sacrifice plot and character to immerse myself in "literature"?
Maybe I'm a product of the times, but a plot which is at least interesting would be nice, even if I don't care about the characters. Please: Barth, Barthleme, and Pynchon write complex, surrealistic fiction, but also give us characters we can care about and plots which fascinate.

In both of these stunning novellas - one set in New York, the other in Los Angeles - Nathanael West shows us a world without a center, one in which the various characters are therefore free to pursue their own idiosyncratic notions of bliss. Conspicuously absent is any widely accepted code of manners which might have a tonic influence in shaping character and aspiration, or even at lowest ebb in keeping people more recognizably human than grotesque. Thus the considerable element of the distorted which figures strongly in each of these pieces. Shrike in "Miss Lonelyhearts" and Faye Greener in "Day of the Locust" are each self-absorbed to a freakish degree, though West's point in such satiric but painful drawing is to bring contemporary readers to see the frighteningly normal in such freakishness, the unacknowledged bizarreness in modern everyday behavior.

Nathanael West was well practiced in the arts of revelation and cruelty that go way beyond what we normally think of as satire. "Miss Lonelyhearts" alone is a dark and disturbing jewel in his very strange crown. It bites the reader softly and injects a moral venom into the reader giving her over to experiences of psychological subtley and derangement that make ordinary psychological novels seem pedestrian - excercises in mere cataloguing. "Miss Lonelyhearts" is a visionary experience.

I wonder if Thomas Harris, the author of "Silence of the Lambs" got any of his inspiration for Hannibal Lector from the character of Shrike. Shrike is very bad. He is a sort of demonic being who cares enough about his victims to give them the very best in a form of torture that interrogates their souls and illuminates every last particle of illusion he finds in them. He doesn't eat their livers with fauva beans and a nice chiante because he doesn't need to. Showing them the nature of their souls in the hellish light of his inquiry is more than enough nourishment for him.
He is happy. He finds it no sin to labor in his vocation.
Miss Lonelyhearts himself is an abusive Christ figure who dies for no one's sins other than his own. He is a directionless victim full of lust and a malice disguised as compassion. He was born for ruin and his death is the exact opposite of anything we would ever call an apotheosis. No one's sins are redeemed. They are confirmed.

Nathanael West apparently was a self-hating jew but his moral rigor is so savage and extreme methinks he might be best thought of as a literary satanist come to torment and educate us all through demonic revelries that move in slow motion. I can't remember if there are very many colors described in this little poisonous novel because the whole effect on my inner eye is a dark wastescape composed of tones in black, false-white, and endlessly arranged shades of gray.

Surely "Miss Lonelyhearts" was one of the best novels of the twentieth century but hardly anybody has heard of it. I recommend it strongly to those who prefer their humor as black as the pit of hell, but hidden behind a sunlight that tortures the ground until spikes of grass grow up.

This review is for the Dramatists Play Service Inc. paperback edition, January 1998. MISS LONELYHEARTS, a play based on Nathanael West's novel of the same title, was the second of five plays written by Mr. Teichmann that played on Broadway. It played October 3 to October 12, 1957, twelve performances.

William Shrike, editor of the Chronicle, chooses a young, leg-man reporter to write a new advice to the lovelorn column in the newspaper. The title of the column, and the young man's name in the play, are Miss Lonelyhearts.

Shrike perceives the column as a mockery, its only purpose to boost circulation. Miss Lonelyhearts initially handles the spoof well, but then begins to feel empathy for the people writing to him and guilty about the insincerity of his responses. This conflict puts him at odds with himself and Shrike, which leads to a tragic ending.

Although the play includes excerpts from some of the letters to Miss Lonelyhearts, it omits his replies, which are only characterized in the dialogue. This one-sided exchange diminishes the thrust of the plot. The key issued is told, not shown.

This work is in a way very difficult to read. The painful stories Miss Lonelyhearts receive often have a grotesque dimension but also may touch the heart. The novel's ironic play with its hero who is at once fake and real sufferer, sympathizer and exploiter makes it difficult for the reader to know how exactly to take it. The writing has a violence and power in it but its tragic story too somehow misses to make its fullest case in sympathy, for Miss Lonelyhearts appears somehow real and unreal at once.
The work of a brilliant but deeply disturbed young writer whose life and work had no second act.

"Miss Lonelyhearts" is the 26-year-old son of a Baptist preacher, working in New York in 1933 as the writer of a gossip column. A sensitive person, he reads thirty or so traumatic letters from readers every day, ranging from women with too many children and abusive husbands, to people who have no idea where their next meal will come from, and he must offer some sort of hope to each one. Shrike, a features editor, is his antithesis, a nihilist who mocks Miss Lonelyhearts's Christian faith, every other philosophy which might offer hope, and Miss Lonelyhearts's every attempt to escape from the sadness of his life. Sex and alcohol do not help, and Miss Lonelyhearts gradually descends into obsessive behavior, hypochondria, and religious fanaticism while still trying to help his readers, several of whom he meets in person.

Though the novel is often described as having dark humor, its emotional power is so overwhelming that few people will find much to laugh about here. Shrike, whose name is both satiric and symbolic (shrikes are birds which impale their prey on thorns), is bent on destroying Miss Lonelyhearts and what he represents (the search for hope), and at a party Shrike has all the guests read aloud and mock the letters from Miss Lonelyhearts's desk--about paralyzed children, a teenager without a nose, suicidal mothers, and exhausted caregivers.

Tautly constructed with overlapping motifs and symbols, the novel is firmly rooted in the Depression and the edge-of-disaster lives of ordinary Americans. As Miss Lonelyhearts becomes drawn into his readers' heart-rending problems, he tries to become a rock, emotionally and symbolically, and as he examines the sadness around him, he also begins to think that God has sent him to perform the kinds of miracles that God performs. West's satiric attitude toward religion here and the use of Miss Lonelyhearts as a Christ-figure, filled with agony and passion, also suggest some sort of satiric Christian martyrdom, but the ending, when it comes, is both shocking and unexpected.

Extremely emotional and filled with cynicism and despair, the novel is the consummate example of Depression literature, firmly establishing the attitudes and philosophies that prevailed as people tried to deal with events so overwhelming that no philosophy, other than nihilism, could fully explain them. West's focus on themes and philosophies and the symbols which illuminate them prevents this brilliant but often heart-rending novel from descending into melodrama and pathos. Mary Whipple

"Miss Lonelyhearts" is the 26-year-old son of a Baptist preacher, working in New York in 1933 as the writer of a gossip column. A sensitive person, he reads thirty or so traumatic letters from readers every day, ranging from women with too many children and abusive husbands, to people who have no idea where their next meal will come from, and he must offer some sort of hope to each one. Shrike, a features editor, is his antithesis, a nihilist who mocks Miss Lonelyhearts's Christian faith, every other philosophy which might offer hope, and Miss Lonelyhearts's every attempt to escape from the sadness of his life. Sex and alcohol do not help, and Miss Lonelyhearts gradually descends into obsessive behavior, hypochondria, and religious fanaticism while still trying to help his readers, several of whom he meets in person.

Though the novel is often described as having dark humor, its emotional power is so overwhelming that few people will find much to laugh about here. Shrike, whose name is both satiric and symbolic (shrikes are birds which impale their prey on thorns, much as a butcher hangs meat on a hook), is bent on destroying Miss Lonelyhearts and what he represents (the search for hope), and at a party Shrike has all the guests read aloud and mock the letters from Miss Lonelyhearts's desk--about paralyzed children, a teenager without a nose, suicidal mothers, and exhausted caregivers.

Tautly constructed with overlapping motifs and symbols, the novel is firmly rooted in the Depression and the edge-of-disaster lives of ordinary Americans. As Miss Lonelyhearts becomes drawn into his readers' heart-rending problems, he tries to become a rock, emotionally and symbolically, and as he examines the sadness around him, he also begins to think that God has sent him to perform the kinds of miracles that God performs. West's satiric attitude toward religion here and the use of Miss Lonelyhearts as a Christ-figure, filled with agony and passion, also suggest some sort of satiric Christian martyrdom, but the ending, when it comes, is shocking and unexpected.

Extremely emotional and filled with cynicism and despair, the novel is the consummate example of Depression literature, firmly establishing the attitudes and philosophies that prevailed as people tried to deal with events so overwhelming that no philosophy, other than nihilism, could fully explain them. West's focus on themes and philosophies and the symbols which illuminate them prevents this brilliant but often heart-rending novel from descending into melodrama and pathos. This edition, edited by Harold Bloom, offers a full range of critical interpretations. n Mary Whipple

I haven't read the critical essays, only the novel itself and it is the best-crafted piece of nihilism I have read since Celine (and utterly different from him, as well).

I lived in Southern California during most of the 1980s (San Diego), and after reading this book, I was amazed at how little had changed since 1939, the year this book was published. West draws perfectly the despair and rootless emptiness underlying the pretty smiles, watered landscapes, imported plants and wonderful lifestyles. Reading this book reminded me of how I found the sight of a palm tree disturbing for years after I moved away.

West also insightfully points out that the absurd culture has been produced by the transients, not the long time natives. I remember putting down Southern California in front of a native one time - she became upset and said "You people made it like this."

Extraordinary!
This is not caricature. This was the "feel" of society--as felt by Nathanael West--in the Hollywood of the 1930s.
More frighteningly, this was, I believe, West's forecast for the "feel" of future American society.
How correct his vision!

Written in the 1930s in the midst of the Depression, "Day of the Locust" portrays the Hollywood glamour scene from the perspective of the oft forgotten supporting characters. This is, those who came to California with high dreams and have become bitter with resentment and disappointment. The novel is told from the perspective of a recent Yale grad, Tod, who is an aspiring artist who takes a job at a movie studio to pay his bills. Throughout the novel, West masterfully portrays a set of characters, whose twisted dreams and aspirations are intertwined into a delicate web of failure.

Although Tod's psyche may be absent of unrealistic dreams of stardom and he is moderately successful, he lets his infatuation overcome him when he meets a talentless wannabe, Faye Greener. Although she may be living a pipe dream (and sings about getting high, for that matter), her vitality and energy enraptures not just Tod, but a whole set of diverse characters, from a dust-bitten cowboy to a painfully shy Midwesterner. Indeed, her mere presence can begin an undercurrent of sexual tension that manifests itself in a violent fury.

Throughout the novel, Tod uses his imagination to picture the setting for his masterpiece painting, the "Burning of Los Angeles". In his months in Los Angeles, he becomes an acute observer of people, often singling out those who have "come to California to die". This includes not only the wannabe starlets, like Faye, but common laborers from the Midwest and South who came to capture the California dream but have had their dreams relegated to the dustbin.

Overall, West succeeds in showing how the "other half" lived during the heyday of Hollywood, as nary a movie star enters the narrative. This is less a novel about Hollywood and more a novel about unrealistic dreams and their potentially sinister implications if left unfulfilled. Although written more almost seventy years ago, it is still relevant today.

Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam

The fact that The Day of the Locust was published in 1939, would, I thought, make it a bit too dated or old-fashioned to enjoy. Happily, I was wrong. Nathanael West's novel is like a well-oiled and maintained Disney ride, guaranteed to educate, amuse and thrill. We climb in the car and enter a tunnel into a world that is, of course, gone forever. Truly an insider's novel, the parasitic Todd lives in the bowels of the many-headed Hollywood beast, but he is not "of it." He comes to Hollywood to work as a studio artist and is too smart to be trapped by all the fascinating things he sees, especially the beautiful Faye. This sets him apart from the drifters, dreamers and pensioners who have been drawn by the allure and glitter. On a smaller scale, Faye IS Hollywood, drawing men close to eventually destroy them much like the lizard hiding in the plant in Homer's house patiently waiting for the next foolish fly to light on the plant's flowers. The only thing in the novel that disappointed me, and only a little, was the dearth of information about Homer Simpson (not that one). I wanted to know more about this polite, quiet and stoic Midwesterner. We know he came west for his health, but why does he invite Faye to live with him? Why does he put up with the abuse? Then I remembered that West was writing before the age of Freud, before the good doctor's psychoanalysis became the normative tool; people were the way they were ... just because. It was `in the blood', or they `took after the father', whatever. Pre-Freud writers gave their characters no breaks for having had a mamma that didn't love them, except perhaps, just a passing mention of the fact.

The secondary characters are fascinating in their brazenness and crudeness; you can almost smell them. They are the kind of folk modern middle class readers don't usually come into contact with, like Earl, for instance, the close-mouthed drugstore cowboy, and Miguel the Mexican with his fighting cocks, which are a metaphor for the men who employ them. The violence between Abe, Earl and Miguel struck me as comic, like the sight of two dogs mating on a Sunday sidewalk in front of a busy church. Perhaps it was because, again, we moderns don't see too many middle class men having fistfights, except in videos.

Young women, uninterested in marriage, sleeping around as they seek to advance their careers, superficiality, frenzied celebrity-worshipping mobs, plain-looking grown men who stupidly lust after beautiful women who are completely uninterested in them, unbridled egotism, desires, dreams, and very little thinking and planning -- the essence of what West worked with here seems to have long ago been mainstreamed down into the great American masses - think of MTV, MySpace, Christina and Britney videos, Survivor and American Idol. But no one, to my knowledge, has illustrated it as vividly and delightfully as West has.

The ending, like the endings of all good novels, drifts slowly away from you, like the beautiful young woman you just held in your arms, fading back into a crowded dance floor. At about 200 pages, a paperback of The Day of the Locust is a must-have addition to your backpack or briefcase, or, perhaps, as an ebook, downloaded into your laptop or cell phone.

The sad fact that this brilliant novel and West's earlier works brought him no significant money or recognition gives this writer succor.

Interestingly, without any intention, I read this novel immediately after finishing Joan Didion's "Play It As It Lays." Each is a burning indictment of Hollywood - this novel was written in 1939 and "Play" was written in 1970.

Like Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49", the style of this novel is quirky and many of the moments are meant to shock the reader. Some shocks (remember this is a 1939 novel) include a screening of a french pornographic film at one person's house of prostitution, a detailed description of a cock fight at Homer Simpson's (yes that is the character's name) garage, a beautiful actress's (Faye Greener) decision to pay for her father's funeral by employing herself with a silent screen actor's cat house, an incredible depiction of running through a studio's lot where one backdrop falls into another - distanced by centuries and continents from the prior, and an angry dwarf's (Abe Kusich) confrontation with about anyone he meets.

The ending reads heavily. Is it metaphor? Is it purely emblematic? In any event, it is riotous, where the dying mental characters of the novel congregate like frantic sheep and hurt one another in a crowded attempt to "get one glance" at a movie star at the famous movie house where many films are opened - Kahn's Persian Palace Theatre.

The book scoffs Hollywood's allure and sensual delight envisioned by the midwesterners (Homer is from Des Moines, Iowa) and others."Once there, they discover that sunshine isn't enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado 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. . . They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn't any ocean where most of them come from, but after you've seen one wave, you've seen them all."

The protagonist, Tod Hackett, cannot escape the ennui - the malaise - with which he lives. Like Walter Percy's "The Moviegoer", the character's life remains in a funk. Unlike Percy's character, Hackett does not escape the ennui, and becomes one of "them." Those whose ". . . boredom becomes more and more terrible. . . They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing." Life (for all of the characters in this book) is miserable under the golden sun of Hollywood.

This is depressing - but not like Didion's "Play." West does not reach into the mind of the protagonist. Instead, West shows us how unique and simultaneously droll Tod's life can be. One can only wonder if this novel is autobiographical.

Although he was little known during his short lifetime, Nathanael West's MISS LONELYHEARTS and THE DAY OF THE LOCUST are two of the most influential works of 20th Century American Literature. They are the best of West's work, and I recommend them very highly. But West's work was extremely hit or miss, and this edition of his two lesser novels demonstrate that fact in abundance.

THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL is West's first novel, a surrealistic fantasy about a man who stumbles upon the Trojan Horse, climbs into the rectum, and meanders through the horse's lower intestines. Along the way he meets an aesthetically argumentative guide, a biographer who is writing a biography of a biographer, a mystic who is attempting to crucify himself with thumbtacks, and sundry others. There is an abundance of ideas here, some of them quite amusing and entertaining, but ultimately this parody of bad-taste pseudo-intellectualism becomes as bad-taste pseudo-intellectual as its subjects.

Written between MISS LONELYHEARTS and LOCUST, A COOL MILLION satirizes the American dream via an extended parody of the Horatio Alger myth, and presents us with the story of a young man who goes out into the world to seek his fortune--and begins his adventures with his lady love sold into white slavery and he himself cast wrongfully into prison. This is an extremely bitter, often funny novel, and it is considerably more readable than BALSO SNELL, but its dryness quickly becomes tedious and the work lags far, far behind either MISS LONELYHEARTS or LOCUST.

These novels are interesting failures at best, and while West fans will enjoy seeing how the writer developed but both THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL and A COOL MILLION have more academic interest than anything else. Recommended for hardcore fans, but all others should pass them by.

While "Balso Snell" is funny in a late-Mark Twain kind of way, the real reason to buy this book is "A Cool Million," the Great American Political Satire. Written in the 1930's (and if you know anything about the wacko American Right of that decade, you'll realize that West is not exaggerrating too much) "A Cool Million" still packs a satirical punch. This is probably because, unfortunately, the right-wing wackos West skewers have now taken over the American asylum...

Former President of the United States Nathan "Shagpoke" Whipple, now C.E.O. of the Rat River National Bank of the town of Ottsville, Vermont, tells young Lemuel Pitkin, "The story of (John D.) Rockefeller and of (Henry) Ford is the story of every great American...Like them, you were born poor and on a farm. Like them, by honesty and industry, you cannot fail to succeed."

With this advice in hand thus begins Lem's journey to secure his fortune and to prevent the foreclosure on his mother's house. The only collateral Lem can put up for the tiny loan he obtains from Whipple's bank is the family cow. After all, according to the ex-President, you must have some money in order to make money.

"A Cool Million" is Nathanael West's mordantly witty and deeply bitter satire of a decent, but profoundly naive young man's attempts to achieve the American Dream during the darkest days of the Great Depression. West effectively lampoons the false promise of the old maxim that hard work and diligence equals success in America. For all his determination, Lem suffers one horrible indignity after another and is ripped to shreds in the process. A pawn in a facist plot to take over New York City, his final achievement is an unintended martyrdom.

The only thing that prevents me from giving this small gem a 5 star review is the constant feeling of dread that I felt in the pit of my stomach while reading this extraordinarily disturbing novella.

[NOTE: This review refers only to A Cool Million.]

Nathanael West, A Cool Million (Berkeley, 1934)

Despite having published less than six hundred pages of material in his short and rather unhappy life, Nathanael West is revered in critical circles for two groundbreaking American novels, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. West published three other novels during his lifetime, and while Lonelyhearts and Locust are constantly in print, the others-- The Dream Life of Balso Snell, A Cool Million, and Good Hunting-- are considerably harder to get hold of. (There is a hardcover edition of four of the novels, excluding Good Hunting, in print from the library of America.) Reading A Cool Million, it's not hard to see why it might not be as popular as his two better-known works.

A Cool Million is a vicious satire of the Horatio Alger stereotypes popular during the Depression, the endless stories of how anyone with enough gumption could succeed in America. West takes an Alger-like hero, Lemuel Pitkin, and sends him on his way to the big city to make his fortune (actually, he's after $1500, but we'll put that aside). By the time he reaches the big city, he's been robbed and arrested. And things only get worse from there. The supporting cast contains not a single likable character (by design) save Pitkin, who's more pathetic than likable, and his childhood sweetheart, whom we first meet as she's being abducted by white slavers to work in a Chinese brothel. Everyone's out for something, and most of them seem to wact to extract it from poor Pitkin.

It is satire that, by turns, treads the edge and hops over it into that fuzzy area where one can't be sure whether West is still being satirical, or whether he's letting a nasty streak of his own show. This far removed from the book's timeliness and publication date, only scholars can be sure, and thus the book doesn't hold up as well as it otherwise might. But if you're not a fan of the Horatio Alger mythology, this should be right up your alley. **

Having read all four of West's novels, I feel that "A Cool Million" is easily the greatest of his works. It presents a sarcastic and cynical view of life in America during the 1930's. The novel is, by the way, a modernization of "Candide," by Voltaire, and it is still fresh after sixty-five years. West is second only to Mark Twain in identifying and attacking society's corruption and vices. The book only gets four stars, however, because it also includes West's worst novel, "The Dream Life of Balso Snell," which is a complete waste of his talents. "Balso Snell" is completely disjointed and unorganized. The main character wanders around inside of a wooden horse and meets various allegorical losers. Now you do not have to read "Balso Snell", because I have just told you the entire story. That the author could produce two works which are such polar opposites in quality and readability is surprising. Buy this book for "Cool Million" - you will not regret it!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lemuel, or Lem is the hero of the story but he had bad luck all the way. First, he learned that their house will be foreclosed if they didn't have money to pay the mortgage. Then, he went to New York to make a fortune with a loan from Mr. Whipple by signing away his cow as collateral. But all his money was stolen by slimy Mape who pretended to be rich. Mape left behind a diamond ring that Glazer (pawnbroker & mobster) bought for around $30. However, the cops thought Lem was the thief & put him in jail. His "sweetheart", Betty was an orphan and though she was raped by Bill Baxter, she couldn't remember a thing. However, Tom Baxter also took advantage of her while she was unconscious. Then, she was captured by white slavers & sold to Wu Fong, owner of a brothel. It almost made me cry. In jail, they pulled out all of Lem's teeth & gave him a false set that didn't fit & always fell off. The cops finally caught the real culprit, Mr. Mape, but Lem was in a sorry state when he was freed. His home had been foreclosed and his mom had disappeared. He lost his right eye rescuing an old man & his daughter but the man thought he was responsible for the run-away horses & scolded him. He was given a glass eye & offered a job for $30 a week by Mr. Hainey who told him to go to a jewelry store, pretend to lose his glass eye, offer a reward & leave. He did that at several stores. He was captured by Wu Fong's henchmen & stuck in the brothel. He almost became a male prostitute, but his false teeth & eye fell out. The client became disgusted & left. Wu Fong had him beaten & thrown out of the street. He found out that there was a girl at the brother, not knowing that it was Betty. He told the cop about Wu Fong but the bad cop not only didn't help but threw Lem in jail. Poor Lem met Betty again when she solicited him in the streets. Both of them were hungry & neither had any money. They met Mr. Whipple again & started for Califormia to dig gold with Raven, an American Indian. In the last scene, Lem got recruited by Mr. Whipple's Revolutionary party to give a speech but was shot dead before he could do so. Lem became a "matyr" of the cause. He was just "a boy out to make a fortune" but "jail was his first reward, poverty his second, violence his third & death his last reward". I pity Lem & wonder if anyone can learn something from what happened to him.