Miss Lonelyhearts is the agony aunt columnist of a newspaper, a joke to his boss, his co-workers, and mostly to himself. A barely functioning alcoholic, he aligns himself, due to his boss’ sarcastic rantings or his own self delusion, with the figure of Christ. He takes on the sufferings of the barely literate people who write to him seeking moral and spiritual guidance, but isn’t equipped to deal with the magnitude of this self-imposed responsibility. Unable to deal with the suffering, the pain and the widespread confusion and fear, Miss Lonelyhearts sinks deeper into a hallucinatory state of despair and confusion.

Miss Lonelyhearts is, clearly, not lighthearted fare. The letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives are horrifying, even today: a woman forced to provide child after child for her husband despite the great pain childbirth inflicts upon her body, a teenaged girl wonders what she has done to deserve her fate to be born without a nose – her father tells her she is paying for the sins of a past life, the sister of a disabled girl who has been raped seeks Miss Lonelyhearts’ advice. Through the careful misspellings and poor grammar of the letters, West shows us how desperate these people are. Their guidance cannot come from education, religion offers them nothing. Miss Lonelyhearts believes that salvation through Christ is the answer, but the very thought makes him ill, and eager to avoid the tauntings of his boss Shrike who compares him endlessly to the son of God.

He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mondolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature . . . the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.

Like The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts drifts between waking life and the main characters’ often violent dreams with religious undertones. It is an interesting technique that becomes more pronounced as Miss Lonelyhearts is driven deeper into his religious hysteria. He attempts to sleep with his Shrike’s wife, tries to rekindle his relationship with his ex-fiancée, Betty, and meets with a woman, Mrs. Doyle, who is married to an older crippled man who has written in to Miss Lonelyhearts. He also comes into contact with Mrs. Doyle’s crippled husband and is invited into their home as something of a warped marriage counsellor. A failed attempt at seduction on her part leads to an accusation of rape and a confrontation with the cripple which, as the bleak tone of the story would have it, doesn’t end well for the troubled Miss Lonelyhearts.

Prodded by his conscience, he began to generalize. Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst.

The most poignant theme of Miss Lonelyhearts seems to be why does suffering exist and why are we so ill-equipped to deal with it? The more religious themes go over my head, thanks to my secular upbringing, but the suffering West speaks of is universal. Ultimately, the failure of all outlets – religion, sex, love, pastoral living, alcohol – sends Miss Lonelyhearts into a frenzy of madness, offering the reader no hope and no redemption. Miss Lonelyhearts is bleak, despondent, with comedy blacker than the sky on a moonless night (thanks Special Agent Cooper), but not detestably so. It’s difficult, after saying all this, to explain exactly why I enjoyed it – possibly for its brutal look at the world, a refusal to sugarcoat existence – but I didn’t close Miss Lonelyhearts feeling utterly dejected.