Word: nathanael
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During the thirties, Nathanael West was similarly stranded. Though the material for his four novels was drawn from the face of the Great Depression, his political intentions were never immediately explicit. To a public looking for easily digestible explanations, he was hopelessly off the ideological mark. Few writers of the thirties were as concerned with intellectual integrity, but West feared his inability to sell his books to a wide audience was an index of his failure as an artist. A socialist (for a time a communist) the polities of his writing were imbedded in the fabric of his style...
...scared off by the proffered parts, some of the available co-stars ("I had never acted opposite a brick wall before"), and the long-indenturing contracts proposed by two studios. After five months, she headed home with nothing to show but a 30,000-word journal, a real-life Nathanael West work that is too libelous to publish...
...same awe that the other two names evoke. For Christians, it is the town where Gabriel announced to Mary that she would be the mother of God, the town where Jesus grew up. But even in Biblical times it suffered from a bad press. When the apostle Philip told Nathanael that the Messiah had come from Nazareth, the Gospel of John reports, the incredulous answer was, "Can anything good come out of that place?" In modern times, tourist buses have generally stopped only long enough for the passengers to buy carved wooden camels and make a quick trip...
Wildly improbable as these goings-on may be, Novelist Stephen Jones has a gift for sweet and savage satire reminiscent of that unwholesome trio: Nikolai Gogol, Nathanael West and Samuel Beckett. His characters parody themselves in obsessive dead-end conversations, groping their way circularly past each other through muddled clouds of private thought and uncertain motive. In this first novel, his descriptions of hotels, restaurants, odd corners of small towns and the seedy people who inhabit them, haunt the mind's eye. Yet Jones' real talent is for making the improbable seem necessary and the grotesque plausibly humdrum...
Leave he does, for an assignment in Hollywood, only to find his Salzburg companions arriving daily-adrift, usually broke, looking for movie money. Behrman's glimpse of Hollywood will not trouble the ghosts of novelists Evelyn Waugh and Nathanael West, but he does focus on something these satirists missed. Behrman's Hollywood is like a latter-day Paris or Geneva-an asylum for talented refugees who in fact fled to the area in the late...