Asking Miss Lonelyhearts for Help

Miss Lonelyhearts is a book written by Nathaniel West. It’s a book that people describe as a masterpiece of American literature, as a great insight into the Great Depression and a bleak outlook at the world. It’s also a book that has been sitting in my closet for years now, building up these expectations until I finally decided to pick it up.

Miss Lonelyhearts tells the story of an unnamed writer of an advice column in a newspaper. People write to Miss Lonelyhearts to share their troubles and to ask for advice and he answers their calls in the paper, trying to give them a semblance of hope. But the letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives are heartwrenching and he no longer knows what to say to his readers. The book is Miss Lonelyhearts descent into depression and madness, buckling under the weight of his own idealism and the heartlessness of his diabolical manager.

All of the above attracted me to this novel. I’ve always been a sucker for advice columns and when you find a way to turn those dark and bleak, I’m even more on board. But I read Miss Lonelyhearts in two days – it’s a very short book – and I didn’t get it. I’d read through it with relative ease and none of the bleakness and sadness in the book had gotten to me. Other reviewers mentioned that they had to put the book down, that it was too hard to read, but that was nowhere near my own experience. It gave me the nagging feeling that I had missed something, so I decided to do some further research and find out what I missed.

Nathaniel West was an American writer in the early 1930s. He wasn’t very successful during his lifetime, which was very short. He died in a car crash when he was just 37, the day after the death of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Apparently, West was a very reckless driver so it didn’t fully come as a surprise. He worked as a journalist to support his work as an author and a screenwriter and got the idea for Miss Lonelyhearts when a friend of his was a real-life advice columnist and showed him the crazy letters he had to answer. He took some and used them almost verbatim in his novel.

The letters we read in the novel are very dire. We read about a girl who has no nose and asks if she should kill herself, about a boy whose sister got raped but all she’s scared of is the punishment they’ll get from their mother, and a woman who is in constant pain but is forced to have another baby which might kill her. There are more examples, all equally terrible and in the book we never see a response from Miss Lonelyhearts to any of them.

What Miss Lonelyhearts does do in the book is judge the people who send him letters. His compassion has vanished after reading so many letters and all he does now is hate the people who write to him. He hates their pain and helplessness. This is made worse by his boss, the horrible Shrike, who blatantly laughs at the sorrow of his readers. He enjoys mocking Miss Lonelyhearts about having morals and being religious, up to the point where Miss Lonelyhearts starts to doubt all of it.

There are a lot of topics in this tiny book. It deals with poverty, religion, art and philosophy. Although I’m not entirely sure where the book stands on whether art and religion are actually bad or the only way out of the bad stuff. I do know that it’s philosophy is a dark one. It looks at the world and sees mostly doom and the best way it finds to deal with that is to simply laugh at it. Shrike is a perfect example of this. He laughs at all the pain and sorrow and isn’t burdened by morals or depression. I don’t think the book is telling me that he’s a character to emulate, but he is one of the few characters who seem to be doing fine. His cruel nature keeps him afloat in this cruel world. He’s the only one who’s managing.

This outlook at life might have been the thing that didn’t connect with me. Michael Jauchen wrote about Miss Lonelyhearts that the troubling thing about the novel is that you acclimate so quickly to the callousness in the book. “West’s novel is a book so dead it deadens you.” This resonated with me. Where, at first, I still felt sorry for the letter writers, I found it harder and harder to care about them when the book continued. It wasn’t that their plights were less interesting, but I had by then already read so much terribleness, that I myself was out of the capacity to care.

I think Jauchen is right in saying that the unsettling genius of the book lies in being able to do this. Jonathan Lethem called the book “a mercilessly unsympathetic novel on the theme of sympathy”. Looking at the book in that light, I definitely admire what it accomplishes. Miss Lonelyhearts manages to completely kill my instinct to care about the plight of others by drowning me in terribleness. It shows me people who have no one to turn to except an anonymous advice column and then reveals that the people behind that column laugh in their faces. It’s a nightmare and definitely not a world I would want to live in.

What West did with this book, was to show a state of the world during the Great Depression. One face of America during that time that was heartless. Reading about all of this, I feel like the book should have been heavy to read. It should have been gutwrenching and a struggle, but what I mostly felt throughout was boredom. The flat affect of the novel and the deadpan look at suffering made sure that I didn’t feel anything, which also meant not feeling the suffering. It’s either a great achievement or a great failure that West’s writing is so emotionless that the novel left me cold.

I’m always a little bothered by art that I just don’t seem to get. Miss Lonelyhearts is definitely one of those works for me. Rationally, I get why it’s good. I see the merits of the book and how it’s smart, but emotionally it has left no impression. Maybe it’s a book I’ll need to revisit later in life. Read it again in a different headspace and hope it will click. But there’s a big chance I’ll never pick up Miss Lonelyhearts again. Just like the unending amount of letters Miss Lonelyhearts gets, there are an unending amount of books I want to read and this one probably won’t make the cut a second time.

What was a book you just didn’t ‘get’ or tried to love, but just didn’t get into? And if you’ve read Miss Lonelyhearts, please share your thoughts on it! I’d love to read more interpretations of the book and how you experienced reading it.