This is a double biography of author Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney who don’t meet until the end of the book when they get married and are soon killed in an auto accident.  Nathanael West was born Nathanael Weisenstein to Jewish parents in Harlem, NY.  His father was a contractor who built residential towers and his mother was an Old World housewife.  As a young man, Nat, as he is referred to throughout the book, was into the Russian authors Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.  He didn’t apply himself at school though and at one point played hooky to hang out at the New York Public Library. He managed to get into some Ivy League colleges though where again he was content to make unsatisfactory grades and eventually dropped out.  Nat also grew to have a taste for prostitutes and would often contract STDs such as gonorrhea.  He and his friends also discovered that going to Central Park at night they could sneak in the bushes and watch homosexual men having sex. Nat never wanted to work, but eventually knew he needed to in order to survive so one of his first jobs was managing a small boutique hotel (which was apparently the rage in the 1920′s).

Nat’s first novel was The Dreamlife of Balso Snell which depicted this guy’s adventures through the Trojan Horse of Greek Mythology by which Snell entered it through the anus.  No one else really got the humor of it but Nathanael and thus he had trouble getting it published.  His next novel is probably his most well known and that is Miss Lonelyhearts.  Miss Lonelyhearts is about a newspaper columnist who gets assigned an advice column and soon learns of all the misfits in the city.  A lot of the advice letters in Miss Lonelyhearts evidently came from real letters Nathanael was shown that were sent into the city’s newspaper.  Meade in this book brings up the subtle plagiarism Nathanael may have been involved with in Miss Lonelyhearts and in another novel he published later.  Later in his life, Nat moved from New York to Hollywood to try his hand at screenwriting and the life in Hollywood gave him plenty of material for his next two novels A Cool Million and especially Day of the Locust which is about a Hollywood costume designer in love with a young starlet and makes a lot of references to the early days of Hollywood.  I plan to read Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust soon so expect an upcoming review on this blog.

The sections of the book on Eileen McKenney were less interesting to me, maybe because I had never heard of her.  She grew up in Cleveland, Ohio.  Eileen had a sister Ruth who she nicknamed Chub.  Eileen was the pretty sister who had all of the dates, while Ruth was more plain and chubby.  When they got older Ruth began writing stories for The New Yorker even though the editors there really didn’t like her writing claiming that her work needed a lot of editing and they weren’t up to standard.  Their favorite stories of Ruth’s though were eventually published into a novel called My Sister Eileen.  My Sister Eileen became a boon to Ruth and was even adapted into a Broadway play and Leonard Bernstein turned it into a musical called On the Town.

There were parts of this book that I found interesting, particularly some of the behind the scenes of Miss Lonelyhearts getting written and the really odd character that was Nathanael West. A lot of the book was pretty boring to me unfortunately.  Toward the end of the book I started listening at 2X speed just to get it over with faster.  Overall if you like American literature this book will be pretty interesting to you especially since West knew Dashiell Hammett and F. Scott Fitzgerald. but West is kind of the B Movie equivalent of American authors.