I am not at all sure as to what the point of this book is to be. Every once in a while, I grabbed a thread but then it disappeared. There may be some nice writing contained within this book but the plot, or lack thereof, overshadowed it. ( )

Many reviewers seem to extract a lot from this short novella, but the main takeaway for me is that you wouldn't want to be a woman in 1930s New York City. ( )

An impressively black-hearted comedy. Like Scoop meets Catch-22, but at just 100 pages it feels rather flimsy by my usual standards. ( )

Started strong and it's studded with vivid and sometimes twisted imagery but the wheels sort of come off toward the end. ( )

There is a lot more wrong with Miss Lonelyhearts than feeling the natural distress that anyone would feel over the dire circumstances of the people who write him seeking his advice, and Nathanael West depicts him and his cohorts as living in a sort of cartoonish, lunatic frenzy. Miss Lonelyhearts' religious crisis, too, is inexplicable and deranged and his actions unhinged. I hesitate, as I did with Grahame Greene's The End of the Affair (another book whose characters suffer bizarre Christian angst--maybe that's just not my thing?), to pan a classic, but am at a total loss about why this book is highly regarded. Reading Harold Bloom's remarkably unconvincing and convoluted introduction did not help, so I guess I'll just chalk it up to another case of different strokes for different folks. Next! ( )