I have finally sunk to the lowest of the low by offering capsule reviews instead of my normal in-depth posts.
51) Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
Nathanael West writes in a surreal style different from the Modernists of his day. At times his surreal descriptions prove creative and unique, while at other times they seem far-fetched and unbelievable like a metaphysical poem gone horribly wrong. Miss Lonelyheart writes the “Dear Abbey” style help column in his local news rag, which at first was meant to be a joke. However, as he reads through the flood of letters from people suffering serious problems he slowly sicks in a malaise of melancholy. He searches for a number of ways to recover an ounce of hope by turning to sex, the cynicism of his editor, art, and finally finding religion and Jesus at the end. However, the religious epiphany at the end proves to be another illusion. West writes a clever work that takes a cynical look at Depression era America, calling into question the values of art, religion, and sex as a means of pleasure and escape in dealing with the darker side of the world. Religion is both a joke and a means of hope, by pulling us away from concrete reality, but by also providing an inch of hope, even if it turns out to be all bullshit (so, I make of the books ending).
52) The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
This novel dissects the moral bankruptcy of Hollywood and the American dream itself. This novel is a tad less surreal in style compared to Miss Lonelyhearts. Tod Hackett works in Hollywood as a scene designer, but in his spare time works on his artistic masterpiece, “The Burning of Los Angeles” full of all the new people out from the East to the West and chaotic destruction of the city. He lusts after one of his models helping him with the painting, Faye Greener, an aspiring actress and the daughter of a washed-up vaudevillian. However, other men want to sleep with Faye as well, including an impoverished cowboy, his Mexican friend, and Homer, a mild-mannered hotel clerk from the East sojourning in California. The characters are all two-dimensional caricatures: we have the aspiring talentless female movie star who sleeps around to advance her career, the washed-up vaudevillian star dreaming of the old days, the hack visual artist pretending to be a “real” artist of genius, the rich Hollywood producer, and many others. So one theme of the novel is the failure of dreams. People dream big, but often it is a far more difficult task to attain them. We also have the running motif of the hack. Todd Hacket’s last name speaks for itself. Faye, however, relies on her charms and sex appeal to advance her career rather than her talent; in other words, she is just as much a hack as her talent relies on how wide she can spread her legs and who she can entice into bed. The novel’s plot in many ways revolves around the many characters pursuing sexual relationships with Faye, with the manly men always winning out over the effeminate artist and noncommittal soft-spoken figures in the form of Todd and Homer. It’s the aggressive macho men who get laid. The novel’s denouement centers around a riot that breaks out over a movie premiere with Homer and Todd at the center. This event parallels the imagery of Todd’s painting with its pandemonium. There are many episodes where normally mild Todd imagines disturbing rape fantasies involving Faye. All this points to the darker side of the human nature underneath the thin veneer of sophisticate society as embodied in Hollywood.
53) A Contract with G-d by Will Eisner
The title story of this graphic novel was an extremely moving look at the relationship the individual has with G-d. A religious Jew who many believe has been blessed by G-d, signs a contract with G-d as a sacred pact that he will continue to devote his life to G-d’s way by doing good deeds and devoting himself to religion, and G-d should reward him with happiness for all his life. He questions the contract once his adopted daughter dies of disease. This event breaks the man and he abandons all his good deeds of the past, and now exploits others as an owner of a tenement. However, one day he attempts to reestablish his contract with G-d with disastrous results. I like that the moral point of this story is that you shouldn’t do good deeds with the expectation of rewards from G-d, but that doing the good deed is the reward itself and sometimes bad things happen to good people. The story is in the vein of Job.
54) A Life Force by Will Eisner
This story is about a bunch of interwoven stories of Jews, Italians, and other gentiles living in the same neighborhood, learning to live together and help each other during hard times.
55) Dropsie Avenue by Will Eisner
This story follows the history of Dropsie Avenue from the original dutch settlers to tenements to run-down slums to its modern days as a closed community of houses. The reader watches as the neighborhood changes and the original inhabitants feel threatened when new ethnic groups move in to town (the dutch feel threatened by the newly arrived English, the English by the Irish, the Irish by the Germans, the Germans by the Italians, etc.); this motif repeats again and again, showing the pattern of ethnocentricity, but also shows hope in successful inter-marriages and ethnic alliances for those not too caught up in ethnic tensions. The street degenerates and is renewed countless times.
56) John Donne’s Poetry edited by A. L. Clements
John Donne is the master of metaphysical poetry. He can transform a blood-sucking flea into a symbol for the insignificance of lost virginity and a plea for sex. He writes elaborate, often abstruse poems about sexuality, celebrating both free love and true love in the form of monogamy. He writes simpler, but elegant poems about his devotion to G-d and his religion in his later poems. He even writes some poems capturing the religious conflicts of his age between Catholicism and Protestantism. Although many think of him as the metaphysical poets who creates elaborate conceits about lovers being like two points of a compass, in truth, his style varies greatly between poems. He writes some of the most beautiful and difficult poems I have ever read.
I love West and Donne.