Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
Re-read this the other night. Still nightmarish and hilarious. Every author who has a book in the self-help section should have to read this. Actually, you could compare it to The Freddie Stories in structure, as West conceived it as “a novel in the form of a comic strip”:
The chapters to be squares in which many things happen through one action. The speeches contained in the conventional balloons. I abandoned this idea, but retained some of the comic strip technique: Each chapter instead of going forward in time, also goes backward, forward, up and down in space like a picture. Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events. Violent acts are left almost bald.
Above is the original dustjacket by Alvin Lustig, which is so much better than all the subsequent covers, and will be available again in a new paperback edition.
betzistar
