The Day Of The Locust

by Nathanael West, Alfred Kazin (Introduction)

Tod Hackett is a brilliant young artist - and a man in danger of losing his heart. Brought to an LA studio as a set-designer, he is soon caught up in a fantasy world where the cult of celebrity rules. But when he becomes besotted by the beautiful Faye, an aspiring actress and occasional call-girl, his dream rapidly becomes a nightmare. For, with little in the way of looks and no money to buy her time, Tod's desperate passion can only lead to frustration, disillusionment and rage...

***

a selection from:

CHAPTER 1:

Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office. The groan of leather mingled with the jangle of iron and over all beat the tattoo of a thousand hooves. He hurried to the window.

An army of cavalry and foot was passing. It moved like a mob; its lines broken, as though fleeing from some terrible defeat. The dolmans of the hussars, the heavy shakos of the guards, Hanoverian light horse, with their fiat leather caps and flowing red plumes, were all jumbled together in bobbing disorder. Behind the cavalry came the infantry, a wild sea of waving sabretaches, sloped muskets, crossed shoulder belts and swinging cartridge boxes.. Tod recognized the scarlet infantry of England with their white shoulder pads, the black infantry of the Duke of Brunswick, the French grenadiers with their enormous white gaiters, the Scotch with bare knees under plaid skirts.

While he watched, a little fat man, wearing a cork sun-helmet, polo shirt and knickers, darted around the corner of the building in pursuit of the army.

"Stage Nine--you bastards--Stage Nine!" he screamed through a small megaphone.

The cavalry put spur to their horses and the infantry broke into a dogtrot. The little man in the cork hat ran after them, shaking his fist and cursing.

Tod watched until they had disappeared behind half a Mississippi steamboat, then put away his pencils and drawing board, and left the office. On the sidewalk outside the studio he stood for a moment trying to decide whether to walk home or take a streetcar. He had been in Hollywood less than three months and still found it a very exciting place, but he was lazy and didn't like to walk. He decided to take the streetcar as far as Vine Street and walk the rest of the way.

A talent scout for National Films had brought Tod to the Coast after seeing some of his drawings in an exhibit of undergraduate work at the Yale School of Fine Arts. He had been hired by telegram. If the scout had met Tod, he probably wouldn't have sent him to Hollywood to learn set and costume designing. His large, sprawling body, his slow blue eyes and sloppy grin made him seem completely without talent, almost doltish in fact.

Yes, despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes. And "The Burning of Los Angeles," a picture he was soon to paint, definitely proved he had talent.

He left the car at Vine Street. As he walked along, he examined the evening crowd. A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sports clothes. Their sweaters, knickers, slacks, blue flannel jackets with brass buttons were fancy dress. The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and sneaks with a bandanna around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Novels, American, 20th Century, Literary Fiction

204 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Born Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein to prosperous Jewish parents, from the first West set about creating his own legend, and anglicising his name was part of that process. At Brown University in Rhode Island, he befriended writer and humourist S. J. Perelman (who later married his sister), and started writing and drawing cartoons. As his cousin Nathan Wallenstein also attended Brown, West took to borrowing his work and presenting it as his own. He almost didn't graduate at all, on account of failing a crucial course in modern drama. West indulged in a little dramatics of his own and, in tearful contrition, convinced a gullible professor to upgrade his marks.

After spending a couple of years in Paris, where he wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, he returned to New York, where he managed (badly by all accounts) a small hotel, the Sutton, owned by his family. As well as providing free board for struggling friends like Dashiell Hammett, the job also gave West ample opportunity to observe the strange collection of misfits and drifters who congregated in the hotel's drugstore. Some of these would appear in West's novel Miss Lonelyhearts.

West spent the rest of his days in Hollywood, writing B-movie screenplays for small studios and immersing himself in the unglamorous underworld of Tinseltown, with its dope dealers, extras, gangsters, whores and has-beens. All would end up in West's final masterpiece, The Day of the Locust.

West's life ultimately ended as tragically as his fictions. Recently married, and with better-paid script work coming in, West was happy and successful. Then, returning from a trip to Mexico with his wife Eileen, he crashed his car after ignoring a stop sign and killed them both. This was just one day after the death of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Day of the Locust is a very good book about a very bad taste…

She posed, quivering and balanced, on the doorstep and looked down at the two men in the patio. She was smiling, a subtle half-smile uncontaminated by thought. She looked just born, everything moist and fresh, volatile and perfumed.

And bad taste, aggravated with mass stupidity, becomes monstrous taste…

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them.

Pop culture calls for conformity, erases individuality, destroys intellect, turns society into a dumb crowd and then drives this buzzing swarm mad.

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Where else could they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?

Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough.

They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. The daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”



Just before he was assassinated, President Abraham Lincoln shared his fervent wish to visit California as soon as his term of office was over. California, almost from from the moment it was admitted into the Union, has been a destination for Americans to dream about. California has been promoted to the world as a place brimming with money, unbelievable opportunities, incredible weather, and beautiful people. Where else could the magic of the movies be conjured?

All one has to do is to move to California to start evolving into a glamorous and successful person, right? Well, maybe that works for some, but for most of those people washing up on the shores of California it turns out that the same reflection shows up in the mirrors in the Golden State as it did in Nebraska, Michigan, and Georgia. Even kissed by sunshine and ocean breezes, the same eyes, the same mug, the same problems stare right back at them.

Tod Hackett lands a job at the studios painting and designing scenery for movies. He had graduated from the University of Yale with a Fine Arts degree and left for California practically before the ink on his diploma was dry. During his off hours, he works on a artwork called The Burning of Los Angeles. The painting is taking on all the tones of all his frustrations, including his moon calf desires for a beautiful young want-to-be actress, Faye Greener.

She is as prodigiously untalented as she is exceptionally lovely. Her father, a chronically ill old vaudeville star, spends his days scamming rubes with his slapstick comedy. If he can make them laugh, he can probably convince them to buy his polish, as well. Through her father Faye meets Homer Simpson, and no, as interesting as that would be, Matt Groening did not name his famous cartoon character after the Homer in The Day of the Locusts.

Simpson has moved to California, for his health, from his home state of Iowa. He is repressed sexually and culturally in stereotypical Midwest fashion. He allows Faye and her father to move in with him in the hopes that she will eventually succumb to his good nature because he has no conducive charm with which to induce her to fall in love with him. There is a growing list of men who all circle around Faye, each hoping that she will choose to give herself to them. When Tod presses her for a chance at her affection, she explains why she can never be with him.

”He had nothing to offer her, neither money nor looks, and she could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her. Tod was a ‘good-hearted man,’ and she liked ‘good-hearted men,’ but only as friends.”

Tod has been bit in the ass by the old, but still prevalent, problem of being too nice, and by definition, not rich enough or dangerous enough to be interesting enough to arouse passion in a silly hearted, beautiful girl with her eye on landing a Hollywood prize.

As a reader, I am pulling for Tod to win her, but at the same time, while trying to conjure a plausible happy future for them being together, I find that my imagination is stretched too thin in attempting to invent a scenario where she could be happy with Tod, or one where he could ever be ideal enough to keep her. Tod becomes so desperate and is so consumed by lust for her that he even daydreams about various situations where he forces himself upon her.

Meanwhile, his painting is taking on darker and darker overtones.

The novel finishes with a flourish at a gathering of people waiting to see the stars arrive for a movie premier at Mr. Khan’s Pleasure Dome. What occurs might have just as easily been a scene in the Mel Gibson movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The revelations are shocking and certainly bleak, but I was left wondering about Tod’s state of mind by the end of the novel. Is he finally free of any delusions about people, or has he lost his mind rather than letting go of his belief in humanity?


Nathanael West

This is a hard hitting novel set against the backdrop of the dirty thirties when desperate times showed us the very best and very worst of people. Nathanael West paints this picture with a cruel, thick brush, with slashing nerve wracking splashes of expression, this snarled bundle of dark emotions is ready to explode when reason slips the bonds of containment and all of that pent up resentment, disappointment, loneliness, heartache, and failure is allowed to escape.

The American Dream in West’s California is a chimera, an oasis in a desert created by a moisture starved mind.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

My vote for the Great American Novel - The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West. Why? West's short novel speaks to what every single American has to deal with - the falsehood of Hollywood, the ultimate con, the complete fake, the billion dollar illusion, shoved in everybody's face, like it or not.

As Nathaniel West captured so brilliantly, once anything or anyone is in Hollywood, there is no escape from being converted into artificiality - even a wooden chest of drawers is painted to look like unfinished wood.

Adults beating the spontaneity out of children so their kid can be the next Shirley Temple. How twisted. Adults dressing, speaking, moving, expressing themselves in imitation of what they see on the screen. How sick. How appalling. How American.

How Nathaniel West captured it all perfectly in this Great American Novel: The Day of the Locust.


I love this photo capturing how the five-pointed stars in the Hollywood sidewalk mirror the five-pointed stars in the American flag.

[David Putnam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one is a, Wow! I wasn’t sure what I was getting into with this book. I would never have stumbled upon it on my own. Friends on Goodreads were discussing it and it sounded interesting. This is one of those great books I don’t know how I missed. I will be digesting it for days to come. I thought it was going to be a noir crime novel and was surprised to find the noir without the crime. In fact, the conflict is never declared, and the story arc is more a story bump. There was a movie made based on this book and I don’t know what they used for a plot. The book deals with 1930’s Hollywood and how two socially inept men deal with their love of a woman trying to make it as a star in Hollywood and the evolution of these three characters. There are wonderful characterizations here. And at the same time, I can see how this book wouldn’t be for everyone.
There is so much here, the economy of words, the descriptions, the wonderful language, the depiction of old Hollywood, and the symbolism. There is a war scene shot on the back, studio lot with a hill built out of canvas and wood for a battle. It’s a real historical battle that was lost. Something goes wrong with the structure supporting the hill and it caves in. The soldiers (extras in the movie) on the hill, like in the real battle are injured and ambulance stretcher bearers carry off the injured. The senseless waste of both incidents historical and current day (1930’s) is subtle. There is a dwarf, cowboys, and weird Hollywood people. The voice reminded me a little of Pete Dexter; Train and Paris Trout both superior books, a couple of my favorites.
One draw back from reading a book with so much depth the next few books I read will pale in comparison.

Okay it's been a couple of days since I finished the book and I'm still thinking about it. In the last couple of pages of the book the main character describes a painting he's working on back at the movie studio. The characters in the painting and their actions in a way depict what has happened in the book. I think what the author is trying to say is that life truer than fiction (and this cliche' shouldn't be taken lightly here) as well as the reverse, fiction is truer life. An amazing book. Art in the truest sense of the word.

David Putnam Author of The Bruno Johnson series

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

As some of you know, I came dangerously close to packing it in and moving to Los Angeles this winter. I'm from California originally, but the other California, up the Five a ways and then off to the left.... Where I grew up people speak of LA in the same disgusted, dismissive, and morbidly fascinated tones they used to talk about Michael Jackson before he died. The Bay Area is majorly creeped-out by the weirdo plastic-surgery-disaster-of-dubious-morals that is Los Angeles. We hate it for its car culture I guess (though we drive up there too), maybe a little for the vapidly sunny weather (ours isn't bad either), but really what we hate its Entertainment Industry and everything related, everything that represents. We are deeply suspicious and insanely resentful of the mindless, soulless crap produced by Hollywood, of shallow surface beauty, of glitzy superficiality and the tinseled-out dreams and the depressing nightmares we vaguely suspect they must engender. According to Berkeley, LA is full of beautiful idiots who are banally bad people; we, on the other hand, are homely, unkempt, sincere neurotics who drink great coffee and ride our bestickered bikes earnestly to independent bookstores. We are a trustworthy people that judges men, women, or otherwise-gender-identified individuals based on their progressive political views and doctoral dissertations, not on the size of their chests, their last picture's gross, or the sparkle of their smiles! LA is soul-killing. And it's boring and ugly.

Anyway, I'm getting a little off-topic here, but I wanted to give some background about my personal programming regarding Hell-A, and especially my horror of Hollywood and its spawn. People in New York are sometimes freaked out by LA but for sort of different reasons -- or in a different way, in any case -- and it was only when I'd tell old Bay Area friends I was moving that their visceral horror drove home the insanity of what I had planned.

"Why would you ever move there????!" they would cry. "The driving, ugh, and.... the.... the people.... the MOVIE PEOPLE! They're all MOVIE PEOPLE!!!"

"I know, I know," I'd say. "But I love the weather." It was February in New York and I wanted to kill myself. "And I really, really, really miss....."

"You miss...?"

"I miss the produce."

This is the truth. I nearly moved to Los Angeles in large part because I haven't eaten a decent fruit or vegetable in six years. This is one of those things you just take for granted growing up in California: that pretty much any produce you buy is grown reasonably close and fairly recently, and that large quantities of it can be easily procured, pretty much anywhere, all year round. This is simply not the case in New York City. The first time I saw lettuce in a supermarket here, I almost started crying. It looked like something that had been strangled by a serial killer in the Central Valley, stuffed in the trunk of a battered Impala, driven to Brooklyn the long way (via Mexico?), dumped in an alley behind the store, chewed on by some rats, rejected by them, then brought inside and offered for sale at something like $3 a head. This kind of lettuce is fairly standard here. Of course, if you're willing to shell out serious cash you can get something prettier, but you'll notice that will have been grown in California too, if it's even domestic. I know how shitty I feel after traveling across the country, and I don't want eat something that's undergone that ordeal. My solution to dealing with this situation has been to stop eating vegetables, so I basically just survive on pizza and bagels (which are both way better here), and by smoking a pack of mentholated cigarettes whenever I get an artichoke craving.

Anyway, for reasons too unbearably shocking and sordid to get into here, I did not wind up moving to LA, so I'm still here in New York. This took some adjustment, especially since it's been late March for about five months now: it just rains all the time and is generally shitty. I spend one-to-three hours every day in an underground tunnel, usually with my face pressed into some stranger's reeking armpit. I trudge through the streets like a goddamn mule, with my bookbag over one shoulder, gym stuff on the other, feeling incredibly frumpy and oppressed. I stagger miles in my heels with my life on my back, usually in the rain, having graphic fantasies about what it must like to have a trunk. A trunk in one's car, which one drives to the supermarket and loads up with Trader Joe's junkfood and a bounty of produce.... fresh, inexpensive, delicious produce, full of nutrients and joy.....

Okay, so the other day I got off work, and you know what? It wasn't raining. Finally. And I felt pretty good! I left work and stopped by my friend's bar in Tribeca to shoot the shit a little on the way to my gym, then left him with a little spring in my step, thinking well, this New York City livin' ain't really so bad! It's nice to be able to live one's life on foot, to pay social calls and run errands in a glamorous neighborhood, and who cares it's one so chichi I'd never be able to live there, no matter what unexpected turns my life happens to take? I can stroll from my office, stop and visit a friend, stroll onto the gym and then do a nice long run up alongside the Hudson River. Is this really so bad? It is not. It is not!

I felt some kind of something settle in me then, and at that moment I made a new kind of peace with staying in New York. You can have quality of life in this city, I thought, as the summer evening sunshine fell on the cobblestone streets.... and then there, as if to reward me, as I turned the corner, was a huge gorgeous sign for the Tribeca Farmers Market.

My heart actually did swell at this point, like it does when the music goes in some great old movie. I've never quite understood why there isn't a Tribeca Farmers Market, seeing as how it's um, the epicenter for well-heeled baby producers who live for just that sort of thing. And this was really the farmers market to end all farmers markets! Like pretty much everything in Tribeca, it gleamed with a patina of expensive specialness that made you just want to buy it. And because it was new, it wasn't crowded at all, even though it was huge, and really seemed to have everything. I don't really go to the Farmers Markets around here too much, mostly because they all seem to close down before I get off work, and then the ones that don't -- like the closest one to me, Saturdays in Park Slope -- always seem to be some big clusterfuck of strollers and pushing, and require a lot more planning and stamina than I feel they're worth.

But this Tribeca one was great. All the produce looked incredible, heaped up in these jewel-toned piles of locally-grown, organic goodness. Apples, carrots, greens, onions.... handmade honey, handmade cheese, handmade yogurt, handmade colorful signs in the stalls, all of it just real beautiful and so picturesque. And I strolled through this slowly, not stopping yet, just taking it in as I blissfully thought: "Oh, fuck you, Los Angeles! New York has it all. This place is amazing. Why would I leave, when everything's here? I can live here no problem.... and I won't starve!"

I was walking behind these two Scandinavian tourists who'd stopped a little ahead of me to talk to one of the farmers. And what a farmer this guy was! The loveliest farmer for the loveliest farmers market, he was straight from Central Casting: eyes twinkling in his kindly weathered face, greying hair peeking out from his slightly battered fruit-selling hat and curling down over his sun-reddened ears. I slowed down to hear what he was telling the women, who now seemed to be looking around in confusion. The farmer had just said something about Jennifer Lopez.

"Wait, what?" I interrupted. That's when I noticed the lady with the clipboard who'd just started yelling. "Did you just say this is a set?"

The farmer grinned and shrugged apologetically. "We're making a movie."

"Of course you are...." I mumbled, shoulders sagging suddenly from the weight of my bags. "Of course there's no Tribeca Farmers Market."

"I wish there was," the farmer said. "Try Union Square?"

"PLACES!" the woman with the clipboard shrieked.

The farmer headed back to his stall, and I split. As I stalked down the block, furiously spinning the ball of my Blackberry (the only fruit there's no shortage of in this town, apparently) an LA-looking type clearly crapping his linen pants screamed in my face. "I've got a camera coming through here! Who's letting all these goddamn people walk on this street?"

"Oh fuck you," I snarled. "I live here. Go back to LA!"

So I was really mad when this happened, but pretty soon afterwards I decided I liked it. I decided something else, too, which is that LA is great because Hollywood's great, and Hollywood's great because it's such a wonderful, durable, flexible metaphor. You know the cliche about how things become cliches? The Hollywood metaphor's a great cliche. It's like a basic formulaic plot that's been used a thousand times, and actually a surprisingly large number of movies and books based on it are pretty fabulous. The Day of the Locust isn't the best of them, but it's notable in part because it was written fairly early -- 1939 -- but more because West's own cocktail of sparkling style and abject nihilism is so well-suited to the topic.

This book has aged in a couple jarring ways -- like that one of the characters is named Homer Simpson, which you'd think would be fun but for me was actually a terrible distraction. The story is the basic Hollywood-eats-your-soul plot, I guess, except it's extremely bleak and depraved and hardcore and almost psychedelic.... and really lovely and beautiful in a certain kind of way. I didn't think it was the greatest thing ever, and actually They Shoot Horses Don't They? made a much bigger impact on me, though this take on Hollywood in the thirties was way more Literary and more specifically about Hollywood. The Day of the Locust is ultimately a weird but sturdy little black comedy that should be mandatory summer reading for anyone with an interest in Hollywood and riffs on its themes.... which should be most people, really.

Why? Because we were totally wrong about LA, growing up in the Bay Area. The entertainment industry isn't a dull, fluffy, fun date movie that's too dumb to think about. Hollywood is ten thousand times more fucked-up and fascinating than anything in Berkeley, and that's why LA's amazing. We didn't get what Hollywood was, looking down at it from the North and thinking there was nothing there beneath all that surface. There's shit crawling around like crazy under the glitter and makeup, which has been pointed out so many times because it truly is a great theme. Hollywood is a fake Farmers Market when you hate your life and you just need fresh greenbeans. Hollywood is fake sets and fake people and gorgeous canyons full of flowers, and aspiring slutty starlets and cynical desperate men and sleazy Racing Form dwarves and cockfighting cowboys and sexy Mexicans and bizarre out-of-place costumes and studios and tequila and rapes and illegal abortions and frightening stage mothers of psychotic child actors and riots and murders and fifty other kinds of insanity..... I'm flipping through and remembering this is actually a pretty awesome book. David Lynch could do an amazing adaptation of this. Why hasn't he? It'd be deadly.

Okay, that's enough procrastination for one night, or maybe even for a lifetime. I'm going to go eat some withered spinach out of a bag now, and cry myself to sleep.

[Guille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Otra de esas novelas en las que la música no me deja disfrutar de la letra como debiera. Cosa mía. No está nada mal, en cualquier caso.

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Deplorables

There is a jocular theory that at some time in the remote past the North American continental plates shifted and everything that was loose fell into California. Day of the Locust confirms this hypothesis.

The cast of the novel is a ménage of 1930's drifters and grifters attracted by the movies, or the climate or the chance for a little unconventional action. Mostly they are hapless obsessives who, once there, become lost in either an underworld of vice or some form of otherworldly fundamentalism.

In one way or another, everyone in Los Angeles becomes an actor in order to avoid recognising the scrape they're in. Tod acts like an artist and ends up part of the dereliction he portrays; Faye dreams of being a film star and becomes the leading lady of her own tawdry demise; Homer (apparently the inspiration for the Homer Simpson cartoon) wants desperately to be a settled householder and gets his wish - by adopting a completely submissive role to an ungrateful Faye; a transvestite is so good, he can only manage an unconvincing imitation of a male.

These are the American ancestors of today's Deplorables. Like the crowd that assembles for Hollywood premieres, these people do not fetch up in Hollywood, that worldwide symbol of America, without malice or reason:

"It was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment... All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough."

But these people can't seem to find themselves and it irritates them:

They don't know what to do with their time. They haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure... Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment... They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing."

This is the America of Donald Trump: a crusading mob, "a great united front of screwballs and screw-boxes out to purify the land."

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathaniel West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some desparing, all twisted by their by their own desires—from the ironically romantic artist narrator to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after. An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life.

My Review:

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

Sad. Yes, that's it, I feel sad. This is a classic of Hollywood literature, I can even sort of see that, but it's as bleak as they come and it's all told, very little shown, at very crucial points. If this is a novel, I'm at a loss to see how; it's some biting character studies glued together by accidents of geography. To me it reads more like a treatment that had to be abandoned, was too dear to West's heart-shaped ice cube, and instead got its B12 shots, 50,000 volts, and liiiiiived.

So Tod (Death in German, get it?) HACKett (movie hanger-on, usu. a writer, get it?) falls for the vapidity that is bleached-blonde Faye Greener, as does poor rube-a-licious Homer Simpson (!!), as does no-bit extra Earle Shoop...I suspect, from some of Faye's father's mannerisms, that he and Faye got up to the badger game a time or two. What in the name of common sense is the appeal?! She's hard as nails, not terribly bright, and unbelievably self-centered. I couldn't abide her from the moment West put this in her mouth:

“I'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her.

"I'm sure you..."

"It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want."

"It's good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel,
but..."

"If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.”

That wasn't fresh and new in 1939, either. I agree that this person exists in her legions at every doorway to stardom, but Faye doesn't rise above that generic feel at any turn. After each encounter with Faye, particularly the après-cockfight cocktail party and its aftermath, I want to ask West, "...AND?! What is it, why are these men so hot-to-trot for this trollop?" He's dead these 74 years, so he won't answer even if I shout, so I'm left bewildered.

Homer Simpson, apparently the lovable loser who gave cartoonist Matt Groening the name for his quarter-century old cartoon oaf, is the most realistic and fully drawn character in the piece. In creating Homer, West has fully focused our attention on him and relegated narrator Tod to the Nick Carraway position as he focuses on Homer and his back-story, his sad and empty existence (the part about the deck chair and the view is one of the best an most telling character tics West ladles on to Homer), and his doom (in the original Celtic meaning of Bha so an dàn duit, this was destined for thee). Homer tries and misses, tries and misses again, tries.... He's never, ever the fun guy or the sweet guy, he's the useful but horrendously annoying guy with the car and the cards.

Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them. They usually know this, but still can’t help crying.

His passion for the cipher Faye comes to its absolutely clearly telegraphed and inevitable conclusion, Tod twitters and flails ineffectually to interfere with it, and in the end it drives both Tod and Homer into the climactic ending of the book:

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

And this at last wove the book together for me, made the preceding ~200pp make some sense to me. This is West's cri de coueur and shout to the gods that Prometheus is back to make trouble again.

A year later he was dead. Hm.

There is no smallest question that West can craft some lovely sentences and some incisive character sketches. He can hang all them on a plot of sorts and make your readerly curiousity bump itch so bad you have to scratch it with his tyrannosaurus-armed stories, even at the risk of running afoul of the brute's severing teeth. But here, in this book, the alchemy that elevates Miss Lonelyhearts to the cold and glittering glory of Everest's heights settles instead into the weirder, less pristine shape of Kilimanjaro: Feet in the humid heat, midsection arid and weirdly populated with things not seen elsewhere, and then the transcendent snowy glory of the ending.

Some years back, my real-life book circle read What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg. Sammy Glick, he of the title, is a character I can't forget and find myself thinking about. Sammy's is a story of hustle and flow, make and do and create...Tod never does one damned thing in this book except chase Faye and wander around. Yet which of these two books has been made into a movie? Not the solid, excellent What Makes Sammy Run?, no sirree, but this collection of grotesques gets made. In a weird sort of way, The Day of the Locust feels to me like a precursor to the viciously cuttingly unfunny humor of A Confederacy of Dunces. Both are utterly of a place, can't be told against the backdrop of any other place, and are pitilessly clear of vision. Both are the best-remembered works by their early-dead authors. And each is, taken on its own merits, marvelous parts in search of a gestalt to animate into more than some wonderful, memorable set-pieces embedded in perfunctory plotlike matrices.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars

A very quick, very good book about the dark side of early Hollywood. I am not sure what I was expecting, but what I got was so much better than I could have imagined!

I saw some comparisons between this book and the works of F Scott Fitzgerald. I can 100% confirm that is true. This felt like the brother (or at least cousin) of The Great Gatsby. If you are a fan of Gatsby, I don't think you can go wrong giving this one a try.

What was so captivating about this book was the farther you get into it, the more messed up it gets - like watching an accident in progress . . .

"Oh, wait, those two cars are gonna hit . . ."

"Oh no, the one driver is not wearing a seatbelt . . ."

"Dang! I cannot believe that pedestrian was caught in the middle . . .'

"Is that gas leaking out the back? Maybe you should put your cigarette out . . ."

Yes, it's a beautiful disaster that you cannot look away from. Early Hollywood may have been glitz and glamor. 1920s and 30s California may have seemed like the place to be. But, there were plenty of locusts to plague the "good" people flocking to the West Coast.

Worth a read for both the classic status and the engrossing story!

Fun fact: Matt Groening confirmed that this book is where he got the name for Homer Simpson.

[Maziyar Yf · Rating 3 out of 5]

هالیوود کارخانه فیلمسازی یا کارخانه رویا سازی ؟

ناتانیل وست در کتاب روز ملخ کوشیده به پرسش فوق پاسخ دهد ، روز ملخ برداشت آزادی ایست از نگاه آقای وست به هالیوود وسپس آمریکا پس از بحران اقتصادی .
وست آمریکا در اوایل دهه سی را سرشار از بی کاری و فقر ترسیم کرده ، آشکار است که خشونت و مصرف الکل در بی کاری به اوج می رسد و سپس ناامیدی ایست که بر همه جا سایه خود را پهن می کند . در چنین شرایطی وظیفه هالیوود است که رویا بسازد ، رویا بسازد و آنرا بفروشد .
آدمهای کتاب وست به شدت سطحی ، طماع ، پیش پا افتاده و مصنوعی هستند ، با اشتیاقی بسیار برای دیده شدن در هالیوود ، هر کدام از آنان خود را همانند ستاره هالیوودی می دانند اما دربهترین حالت سیاهی لشکر هستند . دنیا آقای نویسنده تاریک و طنز آن تلخ و گزنده است ، کتاب به شکلی دیوانه وار به انتها می رسد ، گویا نویسنده از جانب تاد هکت مرگ آرزوها و سوختن رویاهای آنان در لس انجلس را باز گفته است .
هالیوود از نگاه ناتانیل وست بیشتر شبیه کارخانه رویاسازی ایست ، البته او تعبیرتندتری به کار برده : آشغالدانی زباله ها

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dark and foreboding look at 1930's Los Angeles where screen writer Tod Hackett falls for aspiring young actress Fay Greener, but this is a long way from being a love story and has an atmosphere filled with dread, sexual tension and desperate lives, where everything felt more like a surreal nightmare than a Hollywood dream, and although on the short side, West captures this era perfectly, where the glitz and glamour of the movie industry becomes an obsession for those with high hopes of hitting the big time, no matter what the cost. With the added bonus of containing one of my favourite ever endings, this was an absorbing read hard to forget.

[Daniel T · Rating 3 out of 5]

«روز ملخ» رمانی نوشته ناتانیل وست، منتشر شده در سال ۱۹۳۹، درباره وحشیگری نهفته در زیر پوسته رویای هالیوودی. این کتاب از برجسته‌ترین نمونه‌های «رمان هالیوودی» است، خیال‌پردازی‌های دست نیافتنی پرورش یافته توسط صنعت سینمای هالیوود، منجلاب ارزش ها.

در ابتدا، وست این رمان را «فریب خورده» نامید، اما کمی قبل از انتشار آن، عنوان فعلی را که اشاره به طاعون ملخ ها در کتاب مقدس است، انتخاب کرد. که به نوعی نشانگر دغدغه‌های اجتماعی در آن دوران در صنعت سینما را با تصویر میکشد.

همچنین وست در این کتاب زندگی ها و تفکرات اشخاص را که به نوعی رو فروپاشی و یا زوال هستند نیز به خوبی به نماش گذاشته است، میتوان در شخصیت پردازی به او «آفرین» گفت.

این رمان درست در زمانی منتشر شد که آمریکا دوران عجیبی را پشت گذاشته بود، در سال ۱۹۲۹ و بحران اقتصادی جان فرسا، کاهش تولید کارخانه ها، بالا رفتن نرخ بیکاری و البته خشکسالی در ایالات جنوبی که منتهی به از دست رفتن زمین های بسیاری از کشاورزان شد.
اما علت این مشکلات هجوم ناگهانی مهاجران به خصوص به کالیفرنیا بود که نوینسده مطرح «جان اشتاین بک» در دو کتاب «موش ها و آدم ها» و «خوشه های خشم» آن را با تصویر میکشد.

و این بین دوره‌ای طلایی برای هالیوود بود چرا که جایگاه خود را به عنوان مرکزی فرهنگی تثبیت کرد، مردمان رنجیده حال فریب رویای غربی را میخوردند و به این کارخانه رویاسازی پناه میبردند و به تعبیر وست اینجا «آشغالدانی رویاها» است.

وست خود نیز در سال ۱۹۳۳ به مانند نویسندگان دیگری به هالیوود رفت تا زندگی خود را تامین کند، اما این زرق و برق نتوانست چشم او را کور کند، پس او دست روی جنبه‌ی دیگری از این صنعت گذاشت و آن چیزی نیست جز سیاهی لشکرها، دلقک ها و هنرپیشگان بی استعداد که دنیایی دروغین را عرضه میکنند.

درخصوص روابط شخصیت ها و نقش احساسات نیز میتوان گفت:
وست شخصیت هایی را در رمان خود خلق کرده است که وابستگی بسیار کمی به افراد دیگر یا مکان ها دارند. بیشتر آنها از جای دیگری به هالیوود آمده اند و زندگی های دیگری را پشت سر گذاشته اند. قطع ارتباط آنها تقلید از کمبود ماده ای است که در صنعت سینما و در معماری و فضای شهر در اطراف خود می بینند. بسیاری از شخصیت ها سرد و بی احساس به نظر می رسند، مثلاً فی وقتی به تاد می گوید که هرگز نمی تواند او را دوست داشته باشد زیرا او نه پولدار است و نه خوش تیپ. او همچنان به او میل دارد، اما اعتراف می کند که "زیبایی او ساختاری مانند زیبایی درخت بود، نه کیفیت ذهن یا قلب او." تاد نیازی به ارتباط عاطفی با فی ندارد یا انتظار ندارد. او فقط بدن او را می خواهد و حتی در نظر دارد برای سکس به او پول بدهد.

بیشتر قدرت کتاب از طریق خشونت به نمایش گذاشته شده است و اغلب خشونت اولین راه ارتباط افراد با یکدیگر است. یکی از اولین تصاویر در مجموعه ای از تصاویر خشونت آمیز در این کتاب، بدن اسبی را در بر می گیرد که در استخر شنای کلود استی شناور است. این اسب تقلبی است و برای سرگرمی مهمانان مهمانی کلود در استخر قرار داده شده است. مهمان دیگری وقتی اسب او را سرگرم نمی کند بر او خشم میگیرد و او را «یک بدجنس احمق» می نامد.

بیشتر شخصیت‌ها جذب خشونت می‌شوند، چرا که باعث می‌شود در شهر احساس زنده بودن کنند که به گفته تاد: «بسیاری برای مردن آمده‌اند.»
زندگی آنها کسل کننده و تهی است و فقط چشم انداز مرگ و نابودی آنها را به وجد می آورد. در بخشی میخوانیم: وقتی ارل یک چماق را به سر میگل می‌کوبد، تصورات تاد نه از روی وحشت، بلکه یک حس رویایی گونه است. او شروع به تجسم تجاوز جنسی با فیه می کند، سپس بیشتر رویای خود را ترسیم می کند که سرنگونی خشونت آمیز و ویرانی لس آنجلس راه در سر میپروراند.

هیچ یک از شخصیت‌های رمان وست موفق نیستند و چیزی از خود خلق نمیکنند. استفاده مکرر وست از شکست و ناتوانی، ماهیت ناکافی بودن روابط در رمان را تکرار می کند. در حالی که تاد رویای خود را برنامه ریزی می کند، هرگز جامه عمل به آنها نمی پوشاند. هومر خود را مجذوب فی و زن دیگری می‌یابد، اما نمی‌داند با این احساسات چه کند. و تنها راهی که تاد می تواند میل نابجا و نافرجام خود را برای فی برآورده کند، تصور تجاوز به او است.

و در آخر این کتاب به خوبی بحران آمریکا و فریب رویای غربی را خوب به تصویر میکشد و همچنین زوال اخلاقی در این سرزمین رویایی را، خواندن این کتاب برای دوست داران سینما و تاریخ آمریکا میتواند لذت بخش باشد و یا فریبی شیرین.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

We were watching 42nd Street from the tough year of 1933 the other night and my daughter was more than somewhat surprised at the risqué nature of some of the zingers in the first 15 minutes, such as:

Abner, who is bankrolling the new show: I’d like to do something for you…if you’d do something for me.
Dorothy Brock, the leading lady: Why, Mr Dillon, I’d be very glad to…

Stage hand : You remember Ann Lowell?
Stage manager: Not Anytime Annie? Who could forget her? She only said no once, when she didn’t hear the question.

Stage manager: Okay, those three girls on the left. If I were you I’d keep them.
Director: I suppose if I don’t you’ll have to.

Stage manager: What’s your name?
Chorus girl : Diane Lorrimer, 333 Park Avenue.
Fellow chorine in stage whisper: And is her homework tough!

The whole movie rests on the assumed notion that the real currency of the world of showbiz is not money, it’s sexual favours. And the chorus girls are very likely hooking, with some of them daintily trying to pretend they’re not. As the great song “Lullaby of Broadway” puts it

When a Broadway baby says "Good night,"
It's early in the morning.
Manhattan babies don't sleep tight until the dawn:
Good night, baby,
Good night, milkman's on his way

The Day of the Locust is set in Hollywood, not Broadway, but the rapacious slobbering over and trading in young female flesh is the exact same. Quite shocking it is, too, for the modern reader – the leading lady in this teensy acidulous bedlam of a novel is all of 17 years old and a wannabe movie actress and like almost everyone else in this book is stony broke and so just naturally contemplates joining a call girl service, and does so too. Which drives the leading gentleman of this story not a little demented. Makes him frantically figure if he could afford her for a couple of nights, but realises he couldn't.

The whole thing reads like the novel Tom Waits would have written if he’da been born way back when and had a deal more patience. In fact it reads like his song/monologue "9th and Hennepin":

the moon's teeth marks are on the sky
And the broken umbrellas are like dead birds
And the steam comes out of the grill
Like the whole goddam town is ready to blow
And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos
And everyone is behaving like dogs
And all the rooms they smell like diesel
And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept there
And I'm lost in the window
And I hide in the stairway
And I hang in the curtain
And I sleep in your hat
And no one brings anything small into a bar around here
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse
With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific going by
And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
Till you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out over the side to anyone who'll listen

So here are your losers, bores, chumps, no-hopers, hopheads, drunks, the flotsam of the infested scummy shores of outer Hollywood, there’s no story here, just some more-or-less connected scenes of a pitchblack nature at which it’s hard to smile unless you get your fun from watching autopsies, the only laughter is the staccato near hysteria inappropriate sort you try to suppress at the scene of an accident. It’s real nasty stuff then at the end it all goes to hell in a major crowd scene symbolical sort of way.

If you’re looking for the milk of human kindness it done got syphoned out the tank, try another book.

3.5 stars

[AiK · Rating 5 out of 5]

Натанаэл Уэст нарисовал нам эпическую картину места, называемого Голливуд, его насквозь фальшивую атмосферу, его эфемерные надежды и призрачные мечты на успех, толпы ряженых в костюмы всех времен и народов, показное великолепие бутафорских замков и гипсокартоновых дворцов – не более чем видимость, декорации, которые после завершения съемок будут выброшены за ненадобностью. Также и большинство актеров в массовке. И люди, и вещи, всё - расходный материал, и все подспудно понимают собственную недолговечную востребованность, иллюзорность своей карьеры и собственную ничтожность. Все эти странные люди – лжековбои, карлики, лицедеи и девочки из массовки с завышенными амбициями и самомнением кинозвезды – одновременно жалки и ярки. Их яркость, как сам Голливуд и его продукция – сиюминутна, одноразового пользования. Они жестоки, потому что они, как пауки в банки, собраны со всего мира в одном месте и находятся в условиях жесточайшей человеческой конкуренции.
Все герои не являются уроженцами Калифорнии, каждый приехал либо со своей мечтой, либо чтобы умереть в райском месте. То есть смысл жизни у таких людей – работать, копить, а потом приехать за наслаждениями и умереть в удовольствиях, пока хватит денег.
Тод Хаккет приехал Голливуд за своей американской мечтой, он нанялся декоратором, но одновременно он пишет картину апокалипсического сюжета о крушении Лос-Анджелеса. Живет в съемной комнате, влюбился в актрису из массовки, которая прямо озвучила свои критерии для возлюбленного – дорого одет и при деньгах. В общем, он не подходил. Она красива, но бездарна, не способна даже произнести одну фразу, поэтому она уже достигла своего карьерного потолка, но все равно надеется на какой-то шанс. Вообще, это примета времени. Большинство людей ставят очень жесткие критерии своим избранниками, сами будучи никем, и все живут надеждой на какое-то чудо, называемое шансом. Годы идут, а люди все требуют и ждут. Поэтому с реалистичностью персонажей здесь нет проблем. Если Вы думаете, что высокие требования и ожидание шанса или чуд характерна только для женщин, которую олицетворяет Фей, то нет. Разве Тод не имеет высоких требований? Чем ему не подходят простые девушки? Почему нужна женщина с внешностью голливудской звезды? Он тоже ждет чуда или шанса – когда же она ему отдастся. Так что это общечеловеческие модели поведения.
Поражает жестокость героев - Мигель с размаху бьет карлика Эйба об стену, «как кролика о дерево», все успокаиваются, как только тот пришел в себя. Гомер Симпсон с размаху прыгает на Милона Лумиса, соседского ребенка, избравшего его для своих шалостей. Просто какое-то несоизмерение силы, и это ужасно, когда сильные или большие бросаются с кулаками на людей, страдающих дварфизмом или детей, пусть даже те сто раз неправы. Это психопатическая реакция, эти люди ментально нездоровы. Также до содрогания жестока сцена петушиного боя.
Все мы помним трагические события на праздновании Хэллоуина в Сеуле в 2022 году. Это и есть то, что происходило в романе. Люди приезжают поразвлечься, все устремляются туда, где происходит что-то интересное. Показательны преобразования обывателей. Когда они вне толпы – они робки, чуть ли не боязливы, но влившись в нее, они становятся наглыми и задиристыми.
«Счесть их безобидными ротозеями было бы ошибкой. Они были ожесточены и свирепы – особенно люди средних лет и пожилые, - и сделали их такими скука и разочарование.
Всю жизнь они маялись на какой-нибудь нудной, утомительной работе – за прилавками, конторскими столами, в поле, у разных отупляющих машин, - откладывая по грошу и мечтая о дней, когда накопленное купит им досуг. И вот этот день настает. У них – постоянный доход, десять, пятнадцать долларов в неделю, куда еще поехать, как не в Калифорнию – апельсиновый, солнечный край?
Прибыв сюда, они обнаруживают, что одного солнца – мало. Апельсины надоедают – и даже груши и плоды страстоцвета. Ничего не происходит. Неизвестно, куда девать время. Для досуга они не оснащены духовно, для наслажденй – денежно и физически. Неужели они надрывались всю жизнь ради какого-то убого пикника?»
«Скука все ужаснее и ужаснее. Они догадываются, что их надули, и пылают негодованием. Каждый божий день они читают газеты и ходят на кинофильмы. И те и другие потчуют их судами Линча, убийствами, половыми преступлениями, взрывами, крушениями, любовными гнездышками, чудесами, пожарами, революциями, войнами. От такого обилия разносолов они сделались пресыщенными. Солнце? Шутка. Апельсины пресны их утомленным вкусовым бугоркам. Нет на свете силы, которая могла бы поднять их дряблые души и тела. Их обманули и предали. Они корпели и копили зря.»
Вот это психология той структурной единицы, множество которых составляет толпу, приехавшую развлекаться.
Толпа ломится, сжимается и крушит все вокруг. Некоторые озабоченные усиливают напор, чтобы прижаться к какой-нибудь дамочке или девочке. А было ли то, якобы интересное всем, действительно ценным и нужным, стоило ли это все такой смертоносной давки?
Ах, да, надо упомянуть про библейскую аллюзию. Но, мне кажется, Библия говорила о жизни, и даже если не сказать про саранчу, то смысл от этого не изменится. Роман говорит об этом же.
Это хороший роман и стоит того, чтобы быть прочитанным. Он об обывателях по отдельности, и обывателях, собранных в монолитную массу.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange swansong from a novelist whose premature bucket-kicking was a sizeable loss to American letters, a drunken stagger around the fringes of LA, the city “where people come to die” (a line now ascribed to Florida), featuring a whippet-sharp femme fatale and her various slobbery beaus, among them one Homer Simpson. West’s career began with The Dream Life of Baslo Snell, a surrealistic novella more in line with the arcane swagger of early Beckett, and moved swiftly to the episodic, note-perfect paean to alienation Miss Lonelyhearts, a clinical, mordant autopsy of the hollowness of American life (in the 1930s), for my money his finest achievement. His other novel, A Cool Million, is a scathing satirical smackdown of the American Dream in the form of a parodic adventure novel, wherein the hero ends up eyeless, legless, and lifeless in the course of his grapplings with the greasy pole. Fans of Gilbert Sorrentino will not be surprised to read West was an influence, in novels such as Aberration of Starlight the melancholic tenor of ML is present, in Gold Fools the rollicking satire is there, with an Oulipian flavour. Sorrentino is the clear heir apparent to West in many respects, in a conga line with Flann O’Brien, James Joyce, and William Carlos Williams. Anywho, The Day of the Locust is fairly rambling and mopey, neither as miserably sharp nor hilariously bleak as his other works, a nightmarish noir in the mould of Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark.

[Kemper · Rating 4 out of 5]

A grim little tale of a pack of losers leading sad and desperate lives in L.A. in the 1930's. Tod is an artist with a job at one of the movie studios, and he's in lust with Faye, a wannabe actress with no talent and a sick father, who has made it clear that she has no interest in Tod, but that doesn't stop her from teasing him. Homer Simpson (Bear in mind that this was written before Matt Groening was even born.) is a yokel in from Iowa who came to California for his health who apparently has some form of OCD that involves his hands having minds of their own. Throw in a Hollywood producer, a handsome cowboy who just leans against a building all day, a guy who runs cock fights, and a very small bookie, and you've got a crowd of misfits who will make almost anyone feel better about their own lives.

This has some incredible writing with short spot-on depictions of hopelessness and quiet despair. Just to make this an even happier read, the introduction tells how the author, West, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald and was killed in a car accident while rushing to F. Scott's funeral. This is the book that just keeps on giving. Unfortunately, what it's giving is depression.

The worst thing about the book isn't even the author's fault. Having a character named Homer Simpson makes it hard to read something as serious fiction, especially a book like this. Every time I saw the name, I started grinning, even as as the story is describing his sad and shabby little life. All that was missing was an alcoholic named Barney.

[Lyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Day of the Locust first published in 1939 has been called by some the great American novel. I guess I can see where someone would say that but IMHO I don’t think it has aged that well.

A novel about Hollywood in the 30s emphasizing the reality bending nature of Tinseltown may have been jaw dropping and illuminating 90 years ago, but now? Yeah, we all kind of know its not real.

Tod Hackett is an art school graduate working in Hollywood and we follow Tod and a handful of ne’er-do-wells around as they get into picaresque misadventures. One of the characters was named Homer Simpson so that was kind of funny. (Matt Groenig said that was part of the inspiration for his character’s name).

While this is well written and is a meaningful allegory about the American dream polluted and made unreal by Hollywood, it never rose above the level of a good book for me; I liked it but did not really like it.

[Brad · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book 130. The last book in my 2011 goodreads Reading Challenge

Just before I started reading The Day of the Locust, I read something that compared Nathanael West favourably to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, suggesting that his proper place was amongst the literary elite of his day.

I kept a watchful eye open for anything that hinted at a quality on par with Papa or Scott, but once the book started to take shape, I found myself trying, instead, to find a comparison that could accurately describe how it felt to be reading The Day of the Locust.

Imagine a clean and sober Jack Kerouac writing a novel about insane circus freaks who've escaped a mental institution, while attempting to retell The Sun Also Rises with cock fights instead of bull fights (and all the hamfistedness of the resulting metaphors), and channelling and morphing Fitzgerald's love of party-life decadence into party-life decrepitude, with a whole lot of abuse, a little bit of OCD and never-ending soap-box rants, and you've got a good picture of how The Day of the Locust feels to read.

It's not bad, but it's not good either, and I bet it would make a much better film than a novel.

The most interesting part of the book, for me, is its evocation of violence. In Faye, the book contains the only genuinely abusive female character I can remember reading, and it is frightening to watch the way she harms Homer Simpson (yep, that's really his name) both physically and emotionally. But her violence is inherited, inbred, an ineluctable part of her humanity, and just another manifestation of violence in a book full of violence. In fact, every act in the book is an act of violence. Love is violence, weakness is violence, quiet is violence, stoicism is violence, art is violence, caring is violence, kindness is violence, desire is violence, everything is violence.

I feel like all that violence could have been dealt with more effectively -- and been more meaningful -- in a short story. A story culminating in the stomping (a literal jumping up and down on the victim's back) of the little boy, Adore, by Homer (insane, at the time, and beyond any kind of responsible control) without all the crap to get us there and minus the over-the-top riot would have been an exceptional achievement rather than the meandering mess that West left us with.

Nathanael West does not belong in the pantheon of great American writers. He is no Hemingway, no Faulkner, no Steinbeck (but then I don't think F. Scott Fitzgerald belongs in the same league as those writers either). But West's interesting all the same, and if you are interested in reading about one man's vision of violence during the Great Depression in the United States, The Day of the Locust will work for you.

Or you could just read something by a drunk and stoned Jack Kerouac and really enjoy yourself.

[Chavelli Sulikowska · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Are you talking smut?” she asked. “I adore smut.”

I feel like this simple statement really sums up the overall tone of this novel – dirty and debaucherous. The characters are seedy, the location is sleazy and the story is full of vice and violence – all of which is spectacularly glorified: ‘She makes vice attractive by skilful packaging…”

There’s not much uplifting in West’s modern classic and it’s not a particularly enjoyable read, but it is stylishly written and the heinous characters are rendered to gritty perfection. It is both violent and sexually charged, with character’s physicality, whether to abuse or attract a means manipulation and to achieving their goals…‘…Her invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn’t expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn’t even have time to sweat or close your eyes.’

Fay Greener – she is just a plain awful character. Shallow, cold hearted and worst of all an opportunistic user. He had nothing to offer her, neither money nor looks, and she could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her. Tod was a “good-hearted man,” and she liked “good-hearted men,” but only as friends. She wasn’t hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn’t move.’

But she is in fact, very hard boiled – more than that, she is as resilient as a bull ant and has the survival skills of a cat of nine lives: ‘…either way she would come out all right. Nothing could hurt her. She was like a cork. No matter how rough the sea got, she would go dancing over the same waves that sank iron ships and tore away piers of reinforced concrete. He pictured her riding a tremendous sea. Wave after wave reared its ton on ton of solid water and crashed down only to have her spin gaily away…’ Like a flaming match, Fay is striking, but impossible to hold for any length of time before she burns you.

West’s language is both original and elegant – ‘The air of the garden was heavy with the odor of mimosa and honeysuckle. Through a slit in the blue serge sky poked a grained moon that looked like an enormous bone button.’ The diction and cadence of the prose accentuates the claustrophobic, fearsome and dizzying setting and series of events. A bit like stumbling to the fridge in a sweaty daze, searching for a block of ice to put on the back of your neck.

West is adept at using the soft naturalness of the environment to juxtapose the filth of the urban setting as well as the moral filth of the characters: ‘When he leaned over her, he noticed that her skin gave off a warm, sweet odor, like that of buckwheat in flower…’ Ironically, we are well aware that Fay is anything but a sweet smelling ‘flower.’ But clearly, she is masterful at manipulation, ‘raging at him, she was still beautiful. That was because her beauty was structural like a tree’s, not a quality of her mind or heart. Perhaps even whoring couldn’t damage it for that reason, only age or accident or disease…’ I was finally relieved when Tod eventually awoke from his infatuation and saw her for what she really is. Hurrah to that!

Note to the potentially sensitive/squeamish/animal lovers: there is a horrific and descriptive cock fight scene in the book which I found personally quite distressing, albeit very well written. Just something to be aware of as it was unexpected! I have to say, it has one of the most unusual and climatic endings I have ever read. I was literally holding my breath and felt squashed, quite literally. Read it and you will see what I mean! ‘…Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears…’

[Lars Jerlach · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Great Depression might not sound like a particularly comforting background for a narrative, but for an inexplicable reason it strangely enough turns out to be in ‘The Day of the Locust’, Nathanael West’s often overlooked masterpiece.

West has chosen Hollywood and its amalgamation of wannabe movie stars, hangers-on, generic cowboys, agents and prostitutes as the scenario for his 1939 novel. His ostentatious tinseltown is a place where dreams are rarely fulfilled, but rather where they come to die an often slow and painful death. We only peripherally hear about the real Hollywood stars, as the leading men and women in West's universe are the indisputable losers and pursuivants in the carnival of fools that are often as hollow as the glittering world they inhabit. The bawdy chaos that litters their comings and goings seems hilarious at first, but when it merely abates to be reignited and replayed over and over again, the unbearable notion of everlasting despair rapidly begins to penetrate the ultra thin time-worn veneer.

West offers up a weakened imitation of a Hollywood masquerade drained through the proximity to the make believe of the silver screen and its sycophantic admiration for its own artificiality, and though his characters on the surface seem too ridiculous to be true; an Arizonan cowboy, a cockfighting Mexican, a book keeping angry dwarf and a wannabe teenage starlet, and that their often overlapping trials seem too outlandish, their absurd tribulations nevertheless envelop the reader in a distorted kaleidoscopic universe that refuses to let go.

I found it remarkable how poignant this novel is and how well it resonates in a contemporary society where the many still look for acceptance by the few at the top of an exclusive hierarchy that so successfully has learned to master its own grotesqueness through a process of alienation and abandonment. It was genuinely amazing how the novel's combination of despaired escapism and hollow contemporariness continues to spellbind nearly eight decades after it was originally published.

The poetic and elucidatory language is routinely inventive and the predominately absurd characters are all brilliantly captured and described. Their ludicrously exaggerated and often gaudy, alcohol infused collective behavior on their way to inexorable oblivion makes their miserable dissimulation a compelling and thought-provoking read.

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is where the world ends
This is where the world ends
This is where the world ends
In a poisoned meringue of L.A.'s winter.



This book has amazing characters, incredible scenes, and breaks my heart with every page. It set the scene for every David Lynch movie grotesque and the soundtrack for every Pixies song your head can bend itself around. Also, the best cock fight scene in all of literature.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodreads reviewer extraordinaire Glenn Russell makes a case for The Day of the Locust and heand it make a good case. I’ve maybe read it three times now, and I liked it better than any time previous. When I say “like,” I want to say I like it as I like William Gresham’s bleak noir Nightmare Alley, a tale of dark desperation in a circus world. Locust is Hollywoood, USA, and the way during the thirties Great Depression the glamour of the movie universe beckoned so many unfortunate souls.

The Great Gold Rush of the 1890’s? Locust is The Great Platinum Blonde Rush of the Great Depression, a dream of fame and material wealth. “I’m gonna make it in the movies.” It’s Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles, a particularly American capitalist Dream turned nightmare, the tone in Locust also grim, with a touch of surreal hilarity in its desperation. I’m also reading Raymond Chandler’s send-up of that era, Little Sister, featuring Philip Marlowe. Also about women and girls flocking to Hollywood, working as waitresses and then prostitutes, who have had movie extra roles, waiting for their big breaks. Oh! And I also just completed Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Martin Beck novel where girls dream of a romantic life, in the late sixties Sweden, but where The Sexual Revolution leads many of these girls to hard drugs and prostitution as they struggle to just survive. Stories of sad women, sold a cheap bill of goods about a sparkling future.

Oh, there’s another book that would pair well with Locust: The Great Gatsby,, another tragic tale of the corrupting American Dream of material wealth. Sad fact: Locust author Nathaniel West (who wrote another sadly sympathetic portrait of a woman in Miss Lonelyhearts), was close friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and was killed in a car crash on the way to Fitzgerald’s funeral. I know, yikes.

The main characters of Locust include Yale School of Fine Arts grad and screen writer Tod Hackett, who falls (as mostly everyone does) for aspiring young actress Fay Greener, bit part actress, lucky enough to have moved up the ladder to call girl.

“I'm going to be a star some day," Faye announced as though daring him to contradict her.
"I'm sure you. . . "
"It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want."
"It's good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel,
But. . . "
"If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.”

And a yokel accountant from Iowa named Homer Simpson, whose name Matt Groening borrowed for his own critique of American culture, The Simpsons. Simpson, impotent and passive, came to LA for his health, doctor’s orders. Oops.

Hackett is painting “The Burning of Los Angeles,” an apocalyptic vision of a hopeful America that came to sunny California and ended up in an angry movie premiere red carpet mob violence scene. Cue West Side Story’s “America.” Or “Somewhere” But Locust is more breathlessly bleak than West Side Story.

“Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.”

“Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”

“It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are, but it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”

*You like cock fights as symbols of cruelty and desperate violence? Locust has one of the “best,” which is to say most grotesque.

The Great American Novel? If you want an image of tragic dreaming you have Moby Dick, you have The Great Gatsby, you have Grapes of Wrath, and you have The Day of the Locust. Locust is more fever dream or nightmare than plot, and it is born more from Goya’s Caprichos or Picasso’s Guernica than anything else.

[Lizz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t write reviews.

We meet a loosely-knit band of natural-born losers. The most annoying kind of loser, since these are of the type who won’t ever try to remedy their condition. Some could, if they put in the effort, others could at least find a place of relative contentment and safety, regardless of never finding a cure. This does not come to pass.

Oh Faye! The woman wanted by all the men, the men she teases into furies of lust and rage. And unsurprisingly never really loved. Faye with her baggage and delusions that lead her to believe she’s both talented and mysterious, not simply a decent-looking whore. Living with her insane father, Harry, the old untalented vaudevillian. His laughs categorized and practiced, honed to drive Faye out of her mind. His routines as tired as his worn-out body.

Slow, strange Homer Simpson with his sexual repression, teetotaling, fear of just about everything, obsessions galore and his crazy, crazy hands. The perfect pushover. The man who wishes to sleep endlessly, yet fears never waking. Even his friend can’t handle his whiny, self-defeated tone nor his crazy, crazy hands. But let’s be careful how far we push Homer please...

Tod with his raw talent used to bring life to his chaotic fantasy of destruction: his magnum opus of a painting in which he includes the faces of his acquaintances and others who he sees as “those who come to California to die.” His riot dream the only use for his imagination save, his violent rape fantasies centering on Faye. Oddly even in dreaming he never gets quite there. Poor Tod is no protagonist, just a slightly different variety of loser. He could have escaped.

And I liked it! The characters were such caricatures, that it wasn’t depressing to watch them revel in mediocrity and failure. The scenery and descriptions were like Capote or Faulkner. Of course I’d be amiss if I forgot to mention the irascible dwarf, Abe and the big red cock (no, you perverts, a ROOSTER!) and the cockfight which ensues. This gets to the heart of the larger theme of this story. Or Mrs. Jennings and her upper class escort agency/pornography salon, visited almost exclusively by big Hollywood players. This part was mainly dress scenery and set the tone, and it was effective on both counts.

This story would have worked in almost any place. I understand the digs at Hollywood specifically. That Gold Rush feeling, that turned so many from down-on-their-luck to down-and-out. These feelings and scenarios hold true in many other places too. Those nook towns and cranny cities where people’s dreams simply HAVE to come true.

“It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are, but it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

[9/10]

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

For Tod Hackett, a young graduate from Yale’s School for Fine Arts, Tinseltown is not the place where dreams come true, but the place where dreams turn into nightmares. A toxic place, filled with fake scenery and fake people who were promised Eden and found instead a vicious and corrupted version of Sodom and Gommorah.
Nathanael West, like his narrator Tod Hackett, came to California from the East Coast to work in the industry in a minor, poorly paid job. He already had a taste for oddball characters and biting satire, a nihilism that focused on the dark side of the American Dream.
I’ve read his novel as a Pulp Fiction monthly group read, and I struggled initially to fit his style into the noir and hard-boiled scene of the period. West is in a class of his own, the struggle to fit in of his characters feels authentic and his prose is closer to high literature than dime novels, layered with meaning and metaphor, reaching deeper under the surface than I initially thought, just like his Tod Hackett presents himself initially as a bit of a geek who hides a searching, analytical eye:

If the scout had met Tod, he probably wouldn’t have sent him to Hollywood to learn set and costume designing. His large, sprawling body, his slow blue eyes and sloppy grin made him seem completely without talent, almost doltish in fact.
Yes, despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes. And “The Burning of Los Angeles,” a picture he was soon to paint, definitely proved he had talent.

This fictional monumental canvas that is referenced in the opening pages of the novel is for me the visual expression of the content of the story, made manifest in the grotesque re-interpretation of the Dream Factory by the painter’s eye.
Like Tod Hackett, Nathanael West definitely proves here that he has talent, and it’s a real tragedy that his career was cut short soon after the publishing of this novel.

At the time Tod knew very little about them except that they had come to California to die.
He was determined to learn much more. They were the people he felt he must paint. He would never again do a fat red barn, old stone wall or sturdy Nantucket fisherman. From the moment he had seen them, he had known that, despite his race, training and heritage, neither Winslow Homer nor Thomas Ryder could be his masters and he turned to Goya and Daumier.

Winslow Homer, a commercial illustrator who make a career out of painting pretty holiday landscapes, and Thomas Ryder, a British Victorian engraver, are used here as counterpoints, as boring conformists, to the vision of the author that is better expressed in the dark tones and the despair of the Goya late period or in the French caricaturist social commentaries.
Tod Hackett, after making this early statement of intent, proceeds to populate his canvas with a veritable menagerie of misfits and lowlifes, aspiring starlets and middle managers, crooks and other providers of cheap thrills and violent entertainments [pornographic movies and cock fights].
Two support characters stand out from the crowd: the femme fatale and the Midwest bumpkin. Faye Greener is a beautiful young woman who is prepared to do anything to become a star, but is totally lacking in talent or self-awareness. Tod is nevertheless caught in the gravity well of her sex-appeal.

He had nothing to offer her, neither money nor looks, and she could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her. Tod was a “good-hearted man,” and she liked “good-hearted men,” but only as friends. She wasn’t hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn’t move.

Despite knowing her and her ambition, Tod is still acting like a fly caught in a spider’s net, unable to stay away or to stop having wet dreams about Faye. His running commentary on his infatuation runs very close to self-hatred, to impotence. He becomes the passive observer who visits her ailing father, a former vaudeville comedian, witnesses her torrid love affair to a glamorous and stupid cowboy extra and befriends another of Faye’s aspiring beaus, the mild-mannered and awkward Iowa accountant named Homer Simpson.

Her invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper.

He believed that while she often recognized the falseness of an attitude, she persisted in it because she didn’t know how to be simple or more honest. She was an actress who had learned from bad models in a bad school.

Nothing could hurt her. She was like a cork. No matter how rough the sea got, she would go dancing over the same waves that sank iron ships and tore away piers of reinforced concrete. He pictured her riding a tremendous sea. Wave after wave reared its ton on ton of solid water and crashed down only to have her spin gaily away.

While Tod is able to maintain a modicum of distance between his infatuation and his common sense, Homer is presented as man who has lost contact with the real world, living in a state of trance where he even loses control over what his hands are doing.

Someone watching him go about his little cottage might have thought him sleep-walking or partially blind. His hands seemed to have a life and a will of their own. It was they who pulled the sheets tight and shaped the pillows.

The reader is prepped for tragedy, in the manner recommended by Chekhov’s gun principle. We feel that those hands acting on their own will be back with a vengeance. For me, one of the most memorable scenes in the whole novel, of course before the final apocalyptic riot in front of a movie theatre, is the backyard of Homer Simpson’s house, where he contemplates the existential crisis of a garden lizard:

The lizard was self-conscious and irritable, and Homer found it very amusing to watch. Whenever one of its elaborate stalks were foiled, it would shift about uneasily on its short legs and puff out its throat. Its coloring matched the cactus perfectly, but when it moved over to the cans where the flies were thick, it stood out very plainly. It would sit on the cactus by the hour without moving, then become impatient and start for the cans. The flies would spot it immediately and after several misses, it would sneak back sheepishly to its original post.

Equally significant, and iconic, is Tod Hackett’s nightmarish run through the backlots of the studio where he’s working, trying to find the woman of his dreams and getting lost in the labyrinth of broken dreams. To those film buffs like me who are familiar with the work of Mel Brooks, it is easy to find here the inspiration of those chaotic scenes from ‘Blazing Saddles’ or ‘Silent Movie’, by replacing Brooks comedic timing with West’s nihilism.

Throwing away his cigarette, he went through the swinging doors of the saloon. There was no back to the building and he found himself in a Paris street. He followed it to its end, coming out in a Romanesque courtyard. He heard voices a short distance away and went towards them. On a lawn of fiber, a group of men and women in riding costume were picnicking. They were eating cardboard food in front of a cellophane waterfall.

This was the final dumping ground. He thought of Janvier’s “Sargasso Sea.” Just as that imaginary body of water was a history of civilization in the form of a marine junkyard, the studio lot was one in the form of a dream dump. A Sargasso of the imagination!

West references here an almost forgotten novel by Thomas Allibone Janvier about a cemetery of shipwrecks. The image is powerful enough with the given context here and important in the economy of the novel because it underlines what the author considers the corruption of the American Dream by the entertainment industry.
The canvas of the planned “Burning of Los Angeles” by Tod Hackett is almost complete. All it lacks is a zombie scene of brain dead movie fans rioting on the streets of the city:

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

I was planning on a four star rating, balancing the intellectual stimulation with the rather arbitrary structure of the plot and the broad strokes of the characterization, but I left on vacation before writing my review, and the story sort of grew on me in retrospect.
I now believe the book is a milestone in the critical representation of Hollywood and a disturbing study in noir-tinged despair. I plan to track dawn and watch the Schlesinger adaptation of the book from 1975.

[Antigone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, like Homer, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them. They usually know this, but still can't help crying.

Long considered a classic among Hollywood novels, you will find The Day of the Locust has less to do with Tinseltown's inside track than it does our Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Those are the two approaches to the metaphorical realm of the movie business - within the corridors of power or without - and since there's much more pathos available outside the gate? A lot of authors tend to linger there. (Well, that and the hackneyed old instruction to write what you know...)

Nathanael West was an East Coast scribe who failed to find his rung on the literary ladder and wound up, as so many did in the 1930s, California-bound to hack a bit as a screenwriter for the studios. This novel was written between script assignments and published a year before he died - in a car accident at the somewhat tender age of thirty-six. Though to call anything about Nathanael West tender is to lead the lot of you astray. He was a coarse dude. And angry. And disgusted with pretty much the whole human race. Which can sell the book to you or throw you off, and you're just going to have to follow that instinct.

We're dealing with three relative strangers here, ships crashing in the night.

Tod Hackett works in the art department of a motion picture studio and lives in an apartment off Vine. He is enamored of a neighbor, one Faye Greener; an actress who refuses to accept him as a suitor. This rejection has altered the tone of his fantasy life a smidge - leaving it a little darker, a little quicker, and a lot more, oh, he admits this freely, rape-oriented. Faye, for her part, "could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her." It's all very crass but she's a crass girl and, as luck would have it, her crass-girl stars manage to align in the stumble across Mr. Homer Simpson. (Yes.) Homer's new in town, and a rube, and thoroughly neurotic. It takes no genius to recognize the use that might be made.

Damn, you might say, how a classic? Make some sense of this!

Okay.

He left the road and climbed across the spine of the hill to look down the other side. From there he could see a ten-acre field of cockleburs spotted with clumps of sunflowers and wild gum. In the center of the field was a gigantic pile of sets, flats and props. While he watched, a ten-ton truck added another load to it. This was the final dumping ground... And the dump grew continually, for there wasn't a dream afloat somewhere which wouldn't sooner or later turn upon it, having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, lath and paint. Many boats sink and never reach the Sargasso, but no dream ever entirely disappears. Somewhere it troubles some unfortunate person and some day, when that person has been sufficiently troubled by it, it will be reproduced on the lot.

The rest turns on your instinct.

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”

West kicks over the Hollywood sign and exposes the bankrupt American Dream through the eyes of the desolate souls who flit about the sputtering neon flame in decaying, tragic orbits. It's not the vacuous celebrities or the nefarious studio moguls who find their way into West's spotlight; he focuses instead on the bit players, C-list actors and showmen, wanna-be starlets, and other hopeless romantics upon whose farfetched dreams and unobtainable goals the system feasts. Although published in 1939 during the Great Depression, the novel's message is perhaps even more relevant in today's world of widening income inequality, the dying gasp of the forgotten Middle Class.

“They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment...All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the field and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came...Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?

Once there, they discover than sunshine isn't enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit....

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment...The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates...They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”

[Emily May · Rating 4 out of 5]

Depressing, crushing realization that the American dream isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that Hollywood glitz and glamour is just going to screw you up sooner or later.

This is the Golden Age of Hollywood, full of beautiful actresses, movies, hopes and passion. Tod Hackett gets caught up in this world when he finds himself in an LA studio, working as a set designer. As well as Tod, there's a whole bunch of unfortunate characters pulled into this spotlighted charade, most notably - Faye (a wannabe actress), and Homer Simpson (a sexually clueless Iowan with uncontrollable hands).

Perfect for those who like F. Scott Fitzgerald, but want something even more tragic and depressing than Gatsby.

[Blaine · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

Regular readers of my reviews know that I have been making my way through all of the Pop Chart 100 Essential Novels (I’ve now read 71 of them!). For the most part, hanging the chart in my library has served to inspire me to read books I’ve long heard of but had never found the motivation to read. Most have been good or great, well worth reading, and some of those books have become new favorites of mine: Slaughterhouse-Five, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Infinite Jest, Don Quixote, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The God of Small Things, and Anna Karenina.

On the other hand, a few have been so downright awful that their presence on such lists of greatest novels is incomprehensible. Wide Sargasso Sea is mediocre-at-best Jane Eyre fan fiction. Ragtime coasts on cameos from real-life famous people and includes one of the least realistic ‘romantic’ subplots in literature. And Naked Lunch, if I may quote my own review, “is somehow both completely disgusting and utterly boring…. I’d give this book 0 stars if I could.” Sadly, The Day of the Locust falls into this deeply disappointing, Hall of Shame pile.

The Goodreads description of The Day of the Locust makes it sound so much better than it is. For a novel about “Hollywood and its corrupting touch,” there’s barely any connection to Hollywood. The male lead character, Tod, works as a scene painter, and the female lead character, Faye, is a wannabe actress, but nothing in the story connects what happens to these characters to Hollywood itself; the story just takes place there. There’s some racism and homophobia for no particular reason. There’s a surprising amount of violence, but there’s no explanation for how Hollywood or California “breeds” it. Most disturbing, Tod twice has explicit, violent rape fantasies about Faye, again for no particular reason—other than her refusing to sleep with him, even when he literally begs—and without any indication within the text that such fantasies are, you know, a bad thing.

I can see what the author was trying to do, but there are so many better versions of this story, in print and on the screen. If Americans read more books, dog-eared copies of The Day of the Locust would be passed around from one incel to another as evidence of the righteousness of their misogyny. Since I can’t be sure from the text that the author would understand: that’s not a compliment. The quality of the writing itself is pretty good; too bad it’s wasted here. 1/2 star rounded up to 1. Not recommended.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boy oh boy, this is one weird and sordid little book. Like The Great Gatsby, which had been published 14 years before, it shows the seamy underbelly of a glittering American city. Here the setting is Hollywood, where Tod Hackett is a set and costume designer. He’s smitten with his neighbor, Faye Greener, a 17-year-old aspiring actress (“taut and vibrant … shiny as a new spoon”) who’s not above taking a few shifts at the brothel to make ends meet.

Tod is not the only one obsessed with Faye, though; her other suitors include Homer Simpson (so hard to take him seriously because of that name!), a sad sack from Iowa who moved to the California desert for his respiratory health; Earle Shoop the cowboy; and Miguel, a Mexican cock-fighter. Comic relief is provided by Abe Kusich, a gambling dwarf whose slang includes “lard-ass” and “punkola.” The novella opens and ends with mob scenes, but while the first takes place on a studio lot the last is dangerously real.

There are some fairly disturbing elements here. The casual racism is probably to be expected, but the violence of Tod’s fantasies about Faye startled me: “If only he had the courage to wait for her some night and hit her with a bottle and rape her.” But like Daisy Buchanan in Gatsby, Faye is the sort of careless person who will always come out on top – “Nothing could hurt her. She was like a cork.”

West portrays Hollywood as a wasteland of broken dreams: “the dump grew continually, for there wasn’t a dream afloat somewhere which wouldn’t sooner or later turn upon it, having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, lath, and paint.” This was his final work before he died in a car accident in 1940. I got more out of Miss Lonelyhearts, but I’m still glad I read this Wigtown purchase. I have no idea what the title refers to, though it sounds like it might be a biblical reference.

[Carla Remy · Rating 4 out of 5]

01/2022

From 1939
A dry, dark tale of Hollywood's regular people. Tod was called there as a painter. Harry is there as a former vaudeville actor, his adult daughter Faye is an extra. There is a dwarf, A cowboy. Just like now, "the industry" sucks people in. But Homer is there for his health. At one point, Tod is walking through a studio looking at all the artifice. He is planning a painting called The Burning of Los Angeles. Something like this happens.
Nathaniel West apparently died in a car accident at 37. This was his fourth and final book.
I have read this before. I've seen the 1975 movie where Donald Sutherland plays Homer.