The Novels of Nathanael West

West, being Jewish, was excluded from fraternities at Brown but Perelman always maintained that this was not the reason he dropped the name Weinstein. He simply wanted a short, recognisable name. A native New Yorker, West spent his early life managing Manhattan hotels and writing in his spare time.

Everything is out of kilter in West's world and always on the edge of violence. One of the strengths of Woodward's biography is his analysis of the sources and struggles of West's writing, and influences such as Oscar Wilde. Woodward also brings out some of the inconsistencies that make West such an intriguing subject. One friend thought him "the most thoroughly pessimistic person I have ever known" yet he was good company and witty.

He was never afraid of ruffling feathers with his views. It took time, but recognition did come. Here is a passage from the novel that shows West's powers as a writer, as he describes the failure of the American Dream among those who fled to Hollywood in the Thirties. He put his hands up to catch it and for some inexplicable reason didn't hold them close together. The ball tore through, hit him in the forehead, and bounced into some brush. There was a roar from the crowd and [West] took one look and turned tail.

To a man, the crowd had risen, gathered bats, sticks, stones, and anything they could lay hands on and were in hot pursuit. He vanished into some woods and didn't emerge until nightfall. In telling the story he was convinced that if they had caught him they would have killed him. It is unclear whether this ever actually happened, but West later re-imagined this in his short story " Western Union Boy ".

As Jewish students were not allowed to join most fraternities, his main friend was his future brother-in-law S. Perelman married West's sister Laura. West barely finished at Brown with a degree. He then went to Paris for three months, and it was at this point that he changed his name to Nathanael West.

His family, who had supported him thus far, ran into financial difficulties in the late s. West returned home and worked sporadically in construction for his father, eventually finding a job as the night manager of the Hotel Kenmore Hall on East 23rd Street in Manhattan. One of West's real-life experiences at the hotel inspired the incident between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson that would later appear in The Day of the Locust Although West had been working on his writing since college, it was not until his quiet night job at the hotel that he found the time to put his novel together.

It was then that West wrote what would eventually become Miss Lonelyhearts Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent in In , however, two years before he completed Miss Lonelyhearts , West published The Dream Life of Balso Snell , a novel that he had conceived of in college. In , West bought a farm in eastern Pennsylvania but soon got a job as a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood.

The Collected Works of Nathanael West

He published a third novel, A Cool Million , in None of West's three works sold well, however, so he spent the mids in financial difficulty, sporadically collaborating on screenplays. Many of the films he worked on were B movies , such as Five Came Back It was at this time that West wrote The Day of the Locust. He took many of the settings and minor characters of his novel directly from his experience living in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. Sep 19, reem rated it it was amazing Shelves: I was very impressed with Nathaneal West's style that I had to dig into the rest of his novels. Alas, there are only four of them in total. A Cool Million is about the myth surrounding the American dream and follows the story of our hero, Lem Pitkin, as he leaves town to make it in the big city of New York.

The misfortunes that follow his endeavour are harrowing to say the least. In this novel it is clear that West harboured intense cynicism and hatred towards what he perceived as a false notion of America and the American dream. The Dream Life of Balso Snell is charming, weird and extremely funny.

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My favourite part is when Balso, the protagonist, while journeying through the insides of a Trojan Horse, finds a manuscript that reads a lot like Crime and Punishment. The author of the manuscipt turns out to be a 12 year old boy who claims that he only wrote it because his teacher enjoyed Russian literature and his aim was to sleep with her. Jan 20, Gonzo rated it really liked it. American literature is a world of competing cults of personality. The alleged romance of Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway is based on the atmosphere of Paris cafes, and far exceeds their spare masterworks.

Thanks to his reclusivity and a couple Simpsons cameos Thomas Pynchon has developed his own totemic following outsized compared to his mostly unreadabl American literature is a world of competing cults of personality. Thanks to his reclusivity and a couple Simpsons cameos Thomas Pynchon has developed his own totemic following outsized compared to his mostly unreadable novels.

Johnson and Lord Byron come to mind—but to be a success in American letters, it seems one must have an aura greater than his work. This perhaps explains the astounding underappreciation of Nathanael West born Nathan Weinstein , whose best works can stand alongside almost anything America has produced.

During his lifetime, cut short by a car crash in , West had only middling popularity. His completed works total just over pages of material, half of which is essentially juvenilia. Americans are a notoriously narcissistic yet unconfident people. We cannot stop talking about ourselves, especially in our literature. And the books that have won our praise are self-critical in the most self-satisfying way. The Scarlet Letter has grotesquely been contorted into a tale of feminism versus puritanism; Gatsby a tale of our avarice; To Kill a Mockingbird the great indictment of our racism.

All these books are optimistic, even when they touch upon dark topics. Even when Americans look at themselves critically, the reflection must be filtered through a lens of romance that assures us, that for all of our faults, we are yet self-improving. West does not play this game. West is the most uncompromising and cruel of our writers. He stands in the midst of his peers like a terrorist. He is uncompromising in portraying his apocalyptic vision of America and modern man.

Oscar Wilde once said that all bad books are sincere. In the modern industrialized state, the role once played by wise men and priests, and the consolation once given by God in the confessional, has been replaced by the consolation of quacks and frauds like Miss Lonelyhearts. And Miss L often stands before us like a god who has whipped up the human race as a joke, only to be shocked at their sorry state. The first chapter of the novel is a sample of the letters he receives from the poor readers seeking salve for their cruel fates and deformities: The first has been impregnated again and wants permission to abort the child; the second has a hole in her head and wants to know how to keep people from being terrified by her face.

From the above, I realize that the book may sound tedious. Hack artists throughout the 20th Century tried to convince us and themselves that the tools of mass-production have some kind of spiritual weight to them, some value behind the ease of propagating entertainment. The modernists were haunted by the effects of mass media on aesthetics, one which continued until Andy Warhol pushed them to the absurd conclusion. But this was all in vain. The crux and cruelty of life is that all the most important truths are quite simple, yet we are quite weak. The piling-on of technology and media does not add some new spiritual depth to our existences; it merely diverts our eyes away from the bitter truths we would rather ignore.

At the center of the novel is one of the oldest of all philosophical questions, and the one that constitutes maybe the best and most durable critique of Christianity: Why were we put on this planet—and by a loving God, no less—to feel so much pain? Miss L is a kind of heathen Father Zossima who simply does not have the courage to prescribe the only remedy to pain, which is to embrace it. But this is idle. Christianity does not claim to put an end to our sufferings; it opts, rather, to increase our sufferings and to give them meaning.

One of the central claims of Christianity is that we must welcome suffering as Our Lord did. Intra tua vulnera absconde me. We never quite find out if Miss Lonelyhearts is finally willing to take up his own cross. West is writing for moderns, and characteristic to modernity is our blind belief that our sufferings must have an antidote and that we might find it if we just give the wheels of progress a bit more time.

It is seething with hatred and bubbling with a repressed fury which, if West is correct, will someday boil over to consume us all. Tod seems more or less happy with his new life in California, though he is alienated from the greater part of the people and locales around him. Tod is enamored with his neighbor, Faye, a young wannabe-starlet and sexpot who is confident her stardom is right around the corner.

Unfortunately, in a town overrun by whores and hacks, no one else agrees. When she hits hard times after the death of her father, Tod asks Faye if he can pay her bills. When she has pocketed enough money to make rent, she returns to chasing her dream as if nothing has happened. Having had his legitimate attempts at her rebuffed, Tod finally asks to purchase her wares.

Faye is one of the most repellent characters in American letters, yet her treachery is so subtle, and her motivations are so honest and plainly stated, that the reader can never really turn against her. What is nasty about her is also evident and honest, even to herself. Faye knows herself so well, and is so plainly what she is, that we cannot really feel sympathy for the poor saps who gladly fall across her path. Not for a second are we allowed to completely dehumanize Faye; she actually takes on an almost spiritual character at the moments Tod wants her most when her dreams are at the fore when her beauty is most tangible.

And only one recourse is left: There are plenty of artists of alienation. We understand them, we are forced to empathize with them, even if we cannot find sympathy with Tod. Tod is simply too pathetic.

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This distinction goes to Homer of all the last names in the world Simpson, a former hotel manager from Waynesville, Iowa. His passions stoked by a non-sexual encounter with a prostitute, Homer moves to California for no good reason whatsoever.

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After taking the second house shown to him by the real estate agent, Homer spends his day sitting on a broken lawn chair, tending a lizard. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, like Homer, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them.

He is a walking nothing, who exists for nothing but to be exploited. And yet the reader feels great pathos for him. Homer is not proud, not brave, not distinct. He is barely human, a faceless prole lost in the machine of industrial society. Modern writers have struggled to present nothingness to readers because, of course, the mere act of putting letters on a page betrays the purpose. Not to overuse the superlatives, but it is hard to think of any character quite as indistinct as Homer Simpson.

Following a span taking care of her dying father, Homer allows Faye to move in with him, rent-free, though when she finally makes it big, she promises to pay him back. Of course, this is pure unadulterated findom, pathetic in the fact that it is not exploitation, as both people are getting exactly what they want: Tod is also happy to have the one man more pathetic than himself looking over his love interest. Homer actually allows the boys to live in his garage for a while times are tough, says Faye where they begin holding cockfights. Tod finds Homer the next morning in a nearly comatose state.

The tale of sexual frustration which takes up most of the middle of the novel contrasts with the scenes on set and in the hills.

For Homer is just one of the millions of sad losers drawn to women like Faye. He may have a closer vantage point, but what difference is there between him and the man ogling her on the screen back in Waynesville? Mass media makes cuckolds of us all. Throughout history, the effect of Jezebels and Delilahs were confined to a small area for a short time. There were only so many harlots to go around, and most of the time some man would find the courage to step up and put them back in their places.

But the liberation of loose women, not only politically but more importantly through media, has distorted the eternal adversarial relationship between man and whore. What West saw in Hollywood is ever more apparent in our age, where every thot with an Instagram now has control over ten thousand pathetic Homer Simpsons. Considering the modern obsession with portraying doomed romances, it is actually surprising how few authors portray the limitless authority women have over men.

There are many wicked men, but women can become wicked simply by acting as women.

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Men must adopt some role to do evil, women can simply be themselves; women derive most of their power simply from being women. This is something Pip learned in Great Expectations, consoled only by the fact that tormenting Estella seemed to undergo some awareness of this after she had lost her power of attraction.

But for the most part, most authors are content to make even the most calculating woman a mere tool for men. Thus, Jay Gatsby and Dick Driver are not so much undone by female treachery as the fact that their women have simply chosen other better men. West is immune from this. He captures the fact that many women don't care all that much when they ruin a man, and in fact seem to lack the faculty to do so.

We cannot feel resentment against Helen; the harlot who spurred the carnage has been accepted home by husband and kind. Who are we to argue against her, if her slighted husband and countrymen will not? In the end, it was simply an affair between men. Yes, the affair concerned a woman, but soon enough it's water under the bridge. In a similar way, if Faye has no real animus in her actions, why should we have any towards her? Homer is preparing to take the bus home not far from a crowd of people who have begun to flock to a movie premiere.

Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings | Library of America

It is still hours before any celebrities show up, but no one in the crowd cares. They have nowhere else to be. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. But the planes never crash. The confrontation between perverse titillation, impotent desire, and the mindless weight of the mob comes to a head. When I first read the ending, I thought perhaps West had become overwrought; thankfully, the recent mob in Philadelphia following a football victory reminds us that however much our modern rage is dampened by masturbation and videogames and antidepressants, the violence is still there, it is just uncertain as to how it will manifest itself.

The novel almost serves as a weird mirror reflection of so much of the male angst we see in the digital age. Condensing his characters down to 4chan buzzwords may sound disparaging. During his lifetime, West was never appreciated he should have been, and misfortunes plagued him with almost comic ferocity.