Oh my! I think I may be in a little denial of a teensy hangover. The tell tale headache…the breakfast craving for eggs, the desire to drink my way through slurpees, water, juice and soda. However, when you are reading a good book, the bourbon goes down a little sweeter.
I read a review at NPR (Biting Books for Those Bitter on Valentines Day) of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust. The setting takes place in a most curious place for me – Depression-era New York. As a rule, if there be romance in the books that I read, let it be a brilliant surprise. I am not one who has ever, after early adolescence, cracked open a Harlequin novel. Let’s face it - where else outside of a Judy Blume book could a young girl back in the day, get her soft smut?
My tiny little seed of obsession for all that is Modern in Old New York forced me to request this one from the library.
I’ve never heard of this author previously and was delightfully surprised by some of the author's insights. For some reason I was under the impression that only this batch of humans alive, in the Here and Now could have these insights apply when it seems that we are just still a part of that original thinking branch that passes from one generation to the next. For the most part, nothing we feel is new. Applications might be new. Circumstances with current ways that we are living might seem new. But the flow and feeling are not. West hits on these with such accuracy at times that I am reminded that kids never think their parents understand, until they realize twenty or thirty years later, that they do.
There are times that I am rather shocked by some violent thought or almost behaviors. I realize too that this book was originally published in 1933, when the many ways of treating ‘minorities’, women included, were quite acceptable. Seemingly, there is no such thing as fear of being hit with crossing the PC line here. I was aware of finding atrocity in some of his words and then remembering, this book wasn’t written in the 2000’s, where you can’t think without bumpers in your brain re-wiring you into automatic niceness. The times were more filterless and as magnetic as a child’s trip to the Museum of Natural History and seeing the anatomically correct cavemen.
I did like Miss Lonelyhearts more than Day of the Locust. It was a quicker read with a more singular focus. Day of the Locust had a lot more characters to follow, in which the flow from one to another was sometimes like stepping off of plank into unforeseen territory. West has quite an imagination though. I imagine to myself that he had to have been quite far from sober on some of his cerebral excursions which sometimes feel like watching the magician pull a handkerchief out of his pocket. For hours.
All that said, it was an interesting read, a glimpse into the past and was a great bourbon coaster while I started my new read, “The Wolf Gift” by Anne Rice.
