Question 1

Why is Miss Lonelyhearts so short and is that a problem?

Accepted Answer

Miss Lonelyhearts is about 58,000 words — very short by novel standards but exactly the right length for its material. West was a severe self-editor who cut enormous amounts of prose to achieve the compression the novel has; there is no waste and nothing is implied. Its shortness is not a limitation but a formal choice: the suffering the advice columnist receives is rendered in concentrated bursts (the letters themselves are each several sentences), and a longer treatment would risk the very sentimentality West is attacking. Many readers find that the novel's brevity makes it more devastating rather than less.

Question 2

What religion does Miss Lonelyhearts practice and why does it matter?

Accepted Answer

Miss Lonelyhearts is drawn to Christ — not to institutional Christianity but to the figure of Christ as a response to suffering that he finds he cannot sustain. The novel follows his attempts to find in religious feeling a resource adequate to the actual scale of human pain his letters document, and his failure to do so. West presents Christ not as a solution but as an image of what a solution would need to be: someone who could absorb unlimited suffering without flinching. Miss Lonelyhearts's breakdown comes from trying to be that person without Christ's resources. The novel is both a critique of American sentimentality about religion and a genuine examination of what genuine spiritual response to mass suffering would require.

Question 3

Is Nathanael West underrated?

Accepted Answer

Dramatically so — he died in a car accident in 1940 at the age of thirty-seven, one day after F. Scott Fitzgerald died, and was initially overshadowed by Fitzgerald's death; the two writers knew each other and West's accident occurred while he was rushing back from Mexico where he had heard news of Fitzgerald's death. He left only four short novels, of which Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust are the enduring achievements. Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo have all cited him as a major influence. His two masterpieces are among the most technically perfect American fictions of the twentieth century.

Miss Lonelyhearts Reading Order

Complete Miss Lonelyhearts Book List