Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts pulled of the rare accomplishment of going from ahead of its time to irredeemably outdated without ever quite managing to become a bestseller. Making this feat all the more impressive is that the reasons for attaining both states are exactly the same.
In their critique of the novel “Carnival Virtues: Sex, Sacrilege, and the Grotesque in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts,” authors Blake G. Hobby and Zachary DeBoer correctly place the novel within the rather fluid and flexible category of the Comic Grotesque. According to the authors, the hallmarks of a novel slotted within this category “seeks to illicit a type of laughter that equalizes its readers—a laughter that celebrates the bizarre, and perhaps disturbing, elements of life. The grotesque operates in a second world, an alternative realm separate from the realm of institutionalized order and social protocol prevalent in typical daily life. In this second world, what once was off-limits becomes fair game: the inappropriate becomes acceptable; the taboo becomes norm.”
When the novel was first—barely—published during the Great Depression, its story of a man with a really misplaced Christ complex dealing with poor souls seriously looking for an anonymous newspaper columnist for insight into their shattered lives did appear grotesque. Remarkably, the tone of the novel matches the sincerity that was the prevalent tone of the times. The Great Depression was perhaps the least ironic period in the history of 20th century. World War II would change all that and set the world on a course toward the Age of Irony which has made Miss Lonelyhearts especially ill-suited for a comeback.
Admittedly, it would take a writer of great prescience and daring the size of the Grand Canyon to have written a Comic Grotesque novel that could come anyway near to matching what has today become the acceptable. And that was before 2017 when taboo had become the norm! Only a writer capable of the most brittle and corrosive sense of irony could possibly have foreseen in the 1930’s an America that would make even the grotesqueries of West’s own The Day of the Locust—to which the grotesqueries of Miss Lonelyhearts absolutely pales in comparison—seem downright quaint and old-fashioned. West trafficked in the Grotesque to a greater extent than any other major writer of the period (with possible isolated exceptions from the pen of Faulkner). It would not be until Nathanael West had already died that a major American writer would arrive to move into even deeper waters of the Grotesque and when Shirley Jackson did it, she came equipped with enough irony for her and West together.
Nobody can doubt that West was ahead of his time when Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, but his is the sad exception to the rule that all such works eventually find their time and audience. West is generally held in higher critical esteem, but his novels never sold well and the films made from them are too downbeat to ever reach the kind the audience that might at least have allowed them (Miss Lonelyhearts especially) to finally see an audience catch up. It was not necessarily pre-ordained. While it was, of course, only a matter of time before the Grotesque qualities of Miss Lonelyhearts became dated, nobody could have foreseen just how dated nearly everything about it would become. For one thing, it’s a newspaper story trying to find an audience today among an entire generation who’ve literally never cracked open a daily in their lives. Secondly, the problems of those writing into the columnist—like rape, adultery, alcoholism and suicide—would not even qualify for consideration of air time in the spectacle of Jerry Springer and “reality” shows. Even those problems are not necessarily fatal, however, if West had simply done one thing.
Unfortunately, for that legacy, he only does that one thing at the very end in a way that is so out of tune with the tone of the rest of the novel that it winds up losing any impact he may have calculated on. The end of Miss Lonelyhearts is the only part of the story where the novel that was ahead of its time is not helplessly behind the times today. Miss Lonelyhearts is gripping story due to the sincerity of its title character, but for today’s audience, it is a case of too little irony coming way too late.
