West's first novel, it presents a young man's immature and cynical search for meaning in a series of dreamlike encounters inside the entrails of the Trojan Horse.

Balso, the protagonist, comes across the Trojan Horse in the tall grass around Troy and promptly seeks a way to get in: “the mouth was beyond his reach, the navel provided a cul-de-sac, and so, forgetting his dignity, he approached the last.

O Anus Mirabilis!” The literary critic Leslie Fiedler reads much into this and sees the whole novel as "a fractured and dissolving parable of the very process by which the emancipated Jew enters into the world of Western Culture.

[2] The juvenility and incoherence of the novel have prompted critics to disregard it as “a sneer in the bathroom mirror at Art” (Alan Ross[3]), “squalid and dreadful” (Harold Bloom[4]) and “a hysterical, obscure, disgusted shriek against the intellect” (James F. Light[5]).

Nonetheless, by its complete and disgusted rejection of all religious, political and artistic ideals The Dream Life of Balso Snell foreshadows the nihilism of West’s subsequent novels.