Suggest you miss Miss Lonelyhearts

Maybe it's a classic but classics, too, can get moldy over time and, whatever it's strengths, and there are some, I would not recommend Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts" to anyone today - in its time, ca 1930 I think, it was probably considered bold and experimental for a variety of reasons: the short chapters with cryptic titles, the refusal to name the central character (always referred to as Miss Lonelyhearts, which leads to some delicious chapter-opening sentences, along the lines of : "Miss Lonelyhearts sat down and opened he mail..." Pronoun fun aside - there are so many scenes that read today are deeply troubling, not simply because of alcoholism and general irresponsibility, but because of extreme cruelty and extreme sexism: the women are objects who essentially hurl themselves at M.L. - why? - and in one troubling scene M.L. and one of his colleagues torment an old man, amid some veyr disturbing anti-gay comments. I know, I know - West, that self-hating Jew (aka Nathan Weinstein) and intellectual phony who apparently sneaked into Brown - then a bastion of anti-Semitism itself - on a faked transcript - ha! - clearly means for us to read the novella as an allegory or metaphor, though signifying what is unclear to me - and his somewhat Christ-like or perhaps Job-like main character is "redeemed" at the end when he realizes the power of love (after he gets his much-abused girlfriend pregnant) but not before there's some mayhem and the death of a sad, innocent, betrayed husband (the dramatic basis, I guess, for the 2 film versions of ML?). This novel is in a way a bridge between the great 19th-century alienated character (Bartleby) and the postwar 20th-century alienated characters, e.g., Holden Caulfield, Mersault - though note that the more recent alienated/existential characters are narrators, not objects of observation by a first-person narrator (Bartleby qv) or an omniscient narrator. The vary odd scenes of religious ranting, especially on the part of M.L.'s boss, Shrike, are especially effective and strange because of the generally tight, short declarative style, much influence by Hemingway I would guess. And the novella feels like a series of quick, flash scenes loosely connected - a technique that was much imitated and developed by dramatists over the 80 years since M.L. - but ultimately, despite its influences and and status as an early landmark of both absurdism and existentialism and a late if muddy and confusing example of literary allegory, there's too much unpleasantness in this novel - and I'm not being squeamish or overly politically correct here - for me to recommend it as anything other than an object of study.