Miss Lonelyhearts

Miss Lonelyhearts is Nathanael West's second novel. It is an Expressionist black comedy set in New York City during the Great Depression. In the story, Miss Lonelyhearts is an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column which is viewed by the newspaper as a joke. As "Miss Lonelyhearts" reads letters from desperate New Yorkers, he feels terribly burdened and falls into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional barfights. He also suffers from the pranks and cynical advice of his editor at the newspaper, named "Shrike", which is also a type of predatory bird. Miss Lonelyhearts tries several approaches as a way out of this depression (including religion, escaping to the countryside, and sex) but only ends up more confused. Miss Lonelyhearts has an affair with one of his readers but ends up striking her in an effort to fend off her advances. In the last scene, the woman's husband comes to kill the columnist, but he, in the grip of a kind of religious mania, fails to understand this. The man shoots Miss Lonelyhearts, and the two men roll down a flight of stairs together. It is implied, but not stated outright, that Miss Lonelyhearts is killed in this encounter. The general theme of the novel is one of extreme disillusionment with Depression-era American society, a consistent theme throughout West's novels. However, the novel is essentially a black comedy and is characterized by an extremely dark but clever sense of humor and irony. The novel can be treated as a meditation on the theme of theodicy, or the problem of why evil exists in the world. The novel's protagonist is psychologically overwhelmed by his perception of this evil, which is treated as an explanation for his increasingly desperate psychological condition. Although the characters of Miss Lonelyhearts are grotesque caricatures, the periodic letters sent to Miss Lonelyhearts, which describe real people with real insoluble problems, serve to ground the novel's Expressionism in reality. Many of the problems described in Miss Lonelyhearts describe actual economic conditions in New York City during the Great Depression, although the novel carefully avoids questions of national politics. Moreover, the novel is particularly important due to its existential import. The characters seem to be living in an amoral world. Hence, they resort to heavy drinking, sex, and parties. Miss Lonelyhearts has a "Christ complex", which stands for his belief in religion as a solution to a world devoid of values. However, he approaches the status of an absurd hero insofar as his religious convictions further his depression and disillusionment. Ironically, he is shot at the moment he thinks he has had a religious conversion. source: Wikipedia

Author / Editor: West, Nathaniel

Category: Novels

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