672
PARTISAN REVIEW
on an advice column as a lark, is overwhelmed by the endless pleas from
the "Broken-Hearted, Desperate, Sick of it All" masses that allude inge–
niously to the human calamities of the Depression as much as they foretell
our moment of talk-show confessionalism. Shrike, his demonic editor, per–
sonifies a gleeful version of the nihilism Miss Lonelyhearts impotently rails
against but cannot deny. Parodying Miss Lonelyhearts's artistic pretensions,
he demolishes Paterian aestheticism in one fell swoop: "Tell them that you
know that your shoes are broken and that there are pimples on your face,
yes, and that you have buck teeth and a club foot, but that you don't care
for to-morrow they are playing Beethoven's last quartets in Carnegie Hall
and at home you have Shakespeare's plays in one volume."
West's extreme negativity seems more akin to a slacker sneer than any
kind of thirties high-modernist irony. Indeed, many cultural critics, from
William Bennett to David Denby, think that Generation X invented their
own brand of ironic detachment, as if every generation invents nihilism as
much as they think they invent sex. But before there was the balletic vio–
lence of Sam Peckinpah, the ethnic violence of Martin Scorsese, or the
blase violence of Quentin Tarantino, West constructed and justified an aes–
thetic of violence, quite possibly better than anyone else. (In the short
manifesto
Some Notes on Violence,
West proclaims, "In America violence is
idiomatic.") Yet the novel is more than just blood, guts, and gore. West
conceived of the novel as a "moral satire" while also admitting the influ–
ence of comic strips.
In
addition to its cartoonish sex and violence, the
novel also transcends its immediate parodic occasion. Even though Shrike
demolishes any claims for the redeeming force of art-evoking the warn–
ing preceding
Huckleberry Finn-the
novel can stand beside Twain's novel
as a masterpiece despite its attempts to undercut itself.Jay Martin's biogra–
phy gives a detailed account of the arduous three years West spent sweating
out the novel, in contrast to West's casual attitude towards his screenplays;
if his work habits on
Miss Lonelyhearts
were any indication, West's belief in
aesthetic exactitude surpassed Shrike's satire.
Although West's reputation seems to rest almost entirely on the rather
perverse pleasures of
Miss Lonelyhearts,
there are powerful passages sprin–
kled throughout the rest of his
oeuvre. A Cool Million
is West's
Candide,
an
outrageous Horatio Alger parody that pi tilessly chronicles the misfortunes
of callow Lemuel Pitkin from rural poverty to urban violence. The mul–
tiple rapes of Betty Prail (West always called his heroines Betty) may be
gratuitous, but that's the point. The novel is funny in the same way that
Tarantino's
Reservoir Dogs
is funny; you recoil with horror, but find your–
self laughing despite your guilt. Its anti-Fascist satire proved that West's
reflections weren't entirely of a non-political man, even if he tended mere–
ly to make comedic hay out of his rogues' gallery of atrocities (white
