Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) By Nathanael West

 

Last year when I blogged The Day of the Locusts by Nathanael West, my recommendation was a no. I did, however, qualify that critique by indicating I would still read his better-known novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, before writing him off. Earlier this week I did so, fortunately it was a short novel therefore not too much of my time was wasted.

I fail to understand those who “appreciate” West’s work. Both novels were coarse and poorly written, his overview of life is a sad commentary as a style. West is to American literature, what “shock jock” talk shows are to radio … if you have nothing to say, say it loudly and profanely.

Miss Lonelyhearts concerns a newspaper reporter, male, who writes the paper’s advice column. There is, or should I say could have been, a lot that one could work with on that subject, West broached it then failed miserably. Miss Lonelyhearts, the columnist gets achingly depressed by his job, ridiculing his readers, questioning his self-worth. All the while he is ridiculed by his co-workers and an editor who even hold an intervention to try to reignite his cynicism.

West’s formula was to build on the stereotype of reporters as hard drinking, chain smoking jerks; and introducing gross chauvinism and racism, at one point even setting his characters at their hangout tavern relegating them to telling jokes about gang raping a female reporter.

The Day of the Locusts

That this race for the bottom mirrors the same format West used in The Day of the Locusts, leads me to say conclusively, I’ll never read another work by Nathanael West.

Recommendation: Absolutely not.

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) By John Cheever

 

Every once in a while I’ll read works by an author who I know next to nothing about. Such was the case when I picked up the collected novels of John Cheever printed by the Library of America. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979 for a collection of short stories published primarily in The New Yorker magazine.

The Wapshot Chronicle was his first full length novel. Written in 1957, it is set in New England in the post-war era (WWII) and is a family history of sorts. The Wapshot family had generations of prominence in the village of St. Botolphs, an old river town now nearly forgotten to all but summer visitors from Boston.

The family consists of Leander Wapshot, known as the “captain,” his wife Sara, their two boys Moses and Coverly, and Leander’s cousin Honora who is the matriarch of the family and controls the purse strings. Cheever quite skillfully tells each of their individual stories as they progress through their lives, eventually spawning the next generation of Wapshots. Leander, Sara, and Honora are mostly presented in recollections, and the boys are in present tense. The most interesting (to me) is Leander who tells the whole story through a journal he posts in every day, and in his letters to the boys.

The boys, while compatible, are quite different. Moses is slightly older and is clearly the “heir apparent” to the family’s history. He’s sports oriented, destined for college, though at first life beyond the village holds no interest to him. Post graduation he’ll head to Washington DC to a job arranged by Honora. Coverly is more of an introvert, interested in literature, and whose interests are focused anywhere but St. Botolphs. When Moses leaves for DC, Coverly secretly departs on the same train, but with the destination of New York. Both of them will have interesting and improbable lives as they go through young adulthood and marry. This part of the novel reads like a page-turner.

They will return to their childhood home in St. Botolphs for their father’s funeral at which it rains. “Then, before the rain began, the old place appeared to be, not a lost way of life or one to be imitated, but a vision of life as hearty and fleeting as laughter and something like the terms by which he lived.” 

In 1964 Cheever wrote a sequel to the Chronicle and titled it the Wapshot Scandal. I thoroughly like the Chronicle, and I am eager to read Scandal.

Recommended: Yes