americanorwell

MISS LONELYHEARTS IS STILL GETTING LETTERS. When I first read Nathanael West's strange and episodic story 60 years ago I thought it was just picaresque, a sort of dark Damon Runyon. Now I know how prophetic it was. It tells the same story of the deadness and disorder that stalks the land today. We still have deadbeat dads, police gunning down unarmed citizens, maimed and crippled veterans coming home from war, except for the ones in coffins. We have drug ODs, drunks, abortion taboos and enough mayhem and melancholy to fill every newscast. Week after week Miss Lonelyhearts (a nameless young man) got letters from unfulfilled lives, troubled and tortured people, heartaches aplenty which prompted despairing but hopeful advice in his newspaper column. The only difference between now and 1940 is that we get the letters sent to us personally on the news, the papers and the internet only we've added corruption in the capitol, and fallen political idols. We're getting to be cynical like his boss Shrike who belittles any compassion for anyone. So here we are, decades later, in the same eternal despair. However there is another more likable character West created (an anti-hero of course) in his scathing novel of Hollywood: “Day of the Locust”. His name is Homer Simpson. Ring a bell?