Nathanael West accomplished a few several things in his short life, among them: forging his way into both Tufts and Brown Universities, writing several largely ignored satiric novels, writing several equally ignored screenplays, and running a stop sign en route to...
[more]Nathanael West accomplished a few several things in his short life, among them: forging his way into both Tufts and Brown Universities, writing several largely ignored satiric novels, writing several equally ignored screenplays, and running a stop sign en route to the funeral of F. Scott Fitzgerald; while this last effort led to his death, the former three have given him life, securing for his work a belated – and since properly outsized – place in the American literary canon. A cool, quietly caustic, and unique satirical sensibility may have left many of his contemporary readers unfulfilled and perhaps uneasy – few of his works follow the structure of both standard comedic literary timing and standard comedic storytelling – and, when compared to the considerably more inclusive and risible work of, say, his friend and contemporary satirist S.J. Perelman, it is not entirely difficult to understand why. But his struggles with losing pace with contemporary culture and that ever-contemporary fear of a loss of authenticity have made him newly and particularly salient to current readers.
These more contemporary readers of West have placed him in a different canon than the American satirical one into which he had been thrust during his lifetime: that of the American existentialist. While West does not quite dazzle under this codification, either – his prose and vision are considerably less honed and coherent than, say, Walter Percy, the later godhead of American existentialist literary fiction – it suits him better: his concern was not merely to lambast his contemporary urban and ostensibly urbane culture, but to situate it within a broader psychological, sociological, and, dare one say it, effectively philosophical Weltanschaaung. The current rise in interest over this once-forgotten writer is much-deserved, and while the fervor will in all likelihood soon relapse, it will nonetheless leave within the American literary canon a figure whom it would be a shame to have never rediscovered, a figure who may read – save his occasional, dated phrasings and word choice – as more current now than when he was writing. One is saddened by all he could have accomplished in his still young career, by the loss of one of America's most iconoclastic writers.
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