For the novel Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West used “almost verbatim” letters that were written to a newspaper during the Great Depression. Nathaniel Rich examines the lesson West drew:
The letter writers ask for help and wisdom, but all of their pleas can be reduced to a single question—the big question. It is posed most memorably by a cripple named Peter Doyle, who works merciless hours only to come home to a cruel, unfaithful wife. “What I want to no,” writes the semi-literate Doyle, “is what is the whole stinking business for.”
West examines all of the conventional answers, holding each up to scrutiny, before discarding them with disgust. A life devoted to pleasure; to art; to a self-sustaining agrarian existence; to exotic travel; to drugs—all are revealed to be foolish fantasies, one more ridiculous than the next. Happiness is a fraud, a sickness even. Life is the sum of suffering and tawdry pleasures. Man is a stupid, greedy animal. Depression is not only the spirit of the time—it is the eternal human condition. Even suicide is deemed absurd. West reserves the greatest disdain, however, for the consolations of religion. “If he could only believe in Christ,” he writes, “then everything would be simple and the letters extremely easy to answer.”
Rich concludes:
In a bleak era, Miss Lonelyhearts went farther than any novel in its contemplation of despair. The novel is, in fact, the purest expression of despair that American literature has produced, in any era. But it’s not all bad news. Art may provide no consolation in the final reckoning, but it still gives us our best chance to make sense of what Doyle calls “the whole stinking business.”
The Dish 