Customer Reviews

Day of the Locust

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"The Day of the Locust" is about the strange, disparate people that invariably get drawn to Los Angeles in the 1930's, a time when studios put out assembly-line low-budget movies and employed revolving crews of extras, writers, and various technicians. The novel seems influenced by Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" in its portrayal of "grotesques," emotionally or behaviorally defective people on the fringe of society, but its tone is much more vibrant and frenetic; if "Winesburg, Ohio" is a petting zoo, "The Day of the Locust" is a three-ring circus.

At the center of the action is an artist and scene designer named Tod Hackett. He observes southern California with a sort of concerned detachment; he sees it as a wasteland of incongruous, tacky architecture and rootless people who come here to die. His discontent is manifested in his extracurricular plan to paint a canvas called "The Burning of Los Angeles."

Even though Tod may be considered the main character, he's the least interesting member of the cast; he's like the "straight man" in a comedy team. He's in love with an aspiring actress and occasional prostitute named Faye Greener who likes to use men. She has managed to hook a shy, lonely unemployed hotel bookkeeper named Homer Simpson (!) who moved to L.A. from Iowa for his health. Homer has compulsively fidgety hands and occasionally even exhibits the simplemindedness of his bald, mustard-colored cartoon namesake. Faye is also attracted to a lanky cowboy named Earle Shoop who works in a Sunset Boulevard saddlery store, does occasional movie work, and doesn't seem to know he's a caricature.

There is a cavalcade of other colorful characters, including Faye's father Harry, an ex-vaudeville clown who is now peddling silver polish door-to-door; Abe Kusich, a drunken dwarf; Claude Estee, a successful screenwriter who has a rubber sculpture of dead horse in his swimming pool; Joan Schwartzen, a loud, lewd harridan, who is probably Phyllis Diller's progenitor; Miguel, Earle's chicken-tending Mexican friend; and last but not least, Adore Loomis, an obnoxious aspiring kid star.

The novel focuses on the lives of these fringe characters rather than moviemaking, which allows West to demonstrate that he excels at writing unusual, difficult scenes -- a screening of a porn flick, a cockfight, a riot at a movie premiere. The inventiveness, energy, and attitude here cannot be overstated; never have I read a novel that delights so much in pathetic human oddity, in mixing its characters into a violent Molotov cocktail and observing the comical results with jubilation.

I've read all of West's other novels - The Dream Life of Balso Snell, A Cool Million, Miss Lonelyhearts - and all three seemed to miss something that is hard for me to explain. A little two-dimensional, a little hollow. Neither the characters nor the novels themselves seemed to be totally fleshed out. But The Day of the Locust is different. And ultimately I think it is on this novel that West's reputation will either rise or fall.

This book will really live with you long after you've read it. I can easily bring to mind that spectacular cockfight (a fine bit of descriptive writing), Faye's teasing, Harry Greener, the midget, the scene in the nightclub when the cross-dresser sings, and that final horrific scene when the riot breaks out in LA. You can skip West's other novels and you won't be very deprived, but The Day of the Locust is not to be missed.

Locust does a great job of showing the ugly side of the shiny veneer of Hollywood. The book deals with lust, desire, hope, disappointment, failure, rage, and death. To avoid being misleading, I should say that the movie business is not the front and center story here. The interpersonal relationships between a woman and her father and her suitors is the main plotline. Hollywood acts as a backdrop.

Faye is a failed actress who only gets work as an extra, and Homer and Todd are just two of the men who are drunk with desire for her.

This alternates with The Sound and the Fury for my favorite book. I've read it 3 times, which is as much as I've read any book.

...Locust is a quick read and never boring. Check out the movie too.

....To read Nathaniel West's description, it would seem so.

Every character in this novel of 1930s Hollywood is a greedy scoundrel. Every character is out for him/herself. Everyone's a sinner, and it's absolutely delicious.

I love novels with very eccentric, flamboyant characters. The kind of characters who perform on a dime. Faye, the main female character shakes, dances, gyrates, sings....for any audience, no audience etc..

Storywise, you never know what's real and what's make-believe....which is a metaphor for Hollywood itself.

The plot is Tod Hackett, an illustrator from the Mid-West coming out to Hollywood to work in pictures. The characters he meets, and the variety of personality traits, ticks, neurosis, dysfunctions are astounding. This is a novel of fringe, downscale, periphery Hollywood. The losers behind the scenes. Well, here's to the losers, because they move the plot and this has to be one of the most page-turning classic novels I've ever read.

All throughout the novel you get the sense something big is going to go down.....and the characters' own extreme traits drive this. I love it when a writer gets mileage, not from actual plot turns and twists, but solely from personality traits. The story feels like it's just moving along on it's own, as opposed to being heavily contrived.

I thought this novel was extremely interesting, thought-provoking, and suspenseful, as you never really know if the characters and scenes are play-acted, or for real. The reader is really left guessing. Is a fight, a real fight, when the participants just laugh the whole thing off at the end? Do these fringe characters really have all these personality ticks? Or, are these just affectations, at the ready for their next audition? Is there a real apocalypse coming, or is it simply simulated apocalypse, just like everything else along the Hollywood landscape?

You never really know, which is what makes this novel so deep and thought provoking. It can be anything the reader wants it to be. The hallmark of great storytelling/writing is the many interpretations a reader can bring to it.

Either these strange characters are the most creative, inventive people on earth.......or they are the most pathetic, depending on if you really believe (make-believe?) half of what they get themselves involved in.

Some of the most memorable personalities in all of literature.

Now I know why Flannery O'Connor so admired West. His prose is crystal clear, his craft virtuoso. His characters, however ugly, are utterly compelling and tragic. There was simply no stopping them. They would hang on to their delusions even if it destroys them. And then there are the people with no hope whatsoever, existing just for surface pleasure and materialism. Tod, the 'artist', tries to help these people, and nearly goes mad with frustration. West's compassion for these people (cloaked by his biting sarcasm and wit) makes this book a great work of art. It, like O'Connor's "Wise Blood," are among the masterpieces of American fiction. Read it and be ennobled.

This is the quintessential Los Angeles is Hell book and with good reason. Every character is corrupt or awful in some way, but they are just too funny to dismiss as despicable. The two protagonists, Tod Hacket and Homer Simpson, provide alternating perspectives on the Los Angeles Freak Show, with Tod as a sardonic observer who feels at home and Homer Simpson as the Mid-Westerner whose ultimately destroyed by Los Angeles.

Rabelis-like hilarity and 20th century cynicism meet for a funny, disturbing book that's required reading for anyone that wants to mock L.A.

Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam

The fact that The Day of the Locust was published in 1939, would, I thought, make it a bit too dated or old-fashioned to enjoy. Happily, I was wrong. Nathanael West's novel is like a well-oiled and maintained Disney ride, guaranteed to educate, amuse and thrill. We climb in the car and enter a tunnel into a world that is, of course, gone forever. Truly an insider's novel, the parasitic Todd lives in the bowels of the many-headed Hollywood beast, but he is not "of it." He comes to Hollywood to work as a studio artist and is too smart to be trapped by all the fascinating things he sees, especially the beautiful Faye. This sets him apart from the drifters, dreamers and pensioners who have been drawn by the allure and glitter. On a smaller scale, Faye IS Hollywood, drawing men close to eventually destroy them much like the lizard hiding in the plant in Homer's house patiently waiting for the next foolish fly to light on the plant's flowers. The only thing in the novel that disappointed me, and only a little, was the dearth of information about Homer Simpson (not that one). I wanted to know more about this polite, quiet and stoic Midwesterner. We know he came west for his health, but why does he invite Faye to live with him? Why does he put up with the abuse? Then I remembered that West was writing before the age of Freud, before the good doctor's psychoanalysis became the normative tool; people were the way they were ... just because. It was `in the blood', or they `took after the father', whatever. Pre-Freud writers gave their characters no breaks for having had a mamma that didn't love them, except perhaps, just a passing mention of the fact.

The secondary characters are fascinating in their brazenness and crudeness; you can almost smell them. They are the kind of folk modern middle class readers don't usually come into contact with, like Earl, for instance, the close-mouthed drugstore cowboy, and Miguel the Mexican with his fighting cocks, which are a metaphor for the men who employ them. The violence between Abe, Earl and Miguel struck me as comic, like the sight of two dogs mating on a Sunday sidewalk in front of a busy church. Perhaps it was because, again, we moderns don't see too many middle class men having fistfights, except in videos.

Young women, uninterested in marriage, sleeping around as they seek to advance their careers, superficiality, frenzied celebrity-worshipping mobs, plain-looking grown men who stupidly lust after beautiful women who are completely uninterested in them, unbridled egotism, desires, dreams, and very little thinking and planning -- the essence of what West worked with here seems to have long ago been mainstreamed down into the great American masses - think of MTV, MySpace, Christina and Britney videos, Survivor and American Idol. But no one, to my knowledge, has illustrated it as vividly and delightfully as West has.

The ending, like the endings of all good novels, drifts slowly away from you, like the beautiful young woman you just held in your arms, fading back into a crowded dance floor. At about 200 pages, a paperback of The Day of the Locust is a must-have addition to your backpack or briefcase, or, perhaps, as an ebook, downloaded into your laptop or cell phone.

The sad fact that this brilliant novel and West's earlier works brought him no significant money or recognition gives this writer succor.

Some of the depravities of Hollywood and LA depicted here seem slightly quaint today (now that the area has had sixty years to surpass West's vision), but this book still hits the mark with a remarkable frequency. When West is writing at his best he functions as a baleful documentor of what would grow into the LA we all know and love. Cults, pseudoreligions, celebrity-worship, crowds, riots, child actors, hodgepodge architecture, and an industry dedicated to the falsification of reality: all of them are here, and West's writing on these afflictions still retains force today. Ultimately, West sees LA as an environment in which no human goodness can survive-a kind of moral black hole-and this is certainly reflected in the novel's array of characters, who are largely a batch of self-centered xenophobes. Even Tod, ostensibly the novel's "hero," tries (more than once) to summon up the courage to simply rape Faye. In other words, this book won't be a big hit with people who use "I didn't like any of the characters" as a criticism: a shame, because there's a reasonably good study of human desperation to be found here, and West's focus on how certain environments and cultures exacerbate that desperation is still profoundly relevant to our own day. A quick read, not very difficult, dense, or lyrical, but a fine addition to the "literature" on LA.

Nathaniel West's sardonic and dark novel of Hollywood ousiders is as warm and friendly as a dead codfish. A group of oddballs, all living in Hollywood all seem to be slipping towards destruction in this classic of the genre. A studio artist, an aspiring actress and old vaudevillian and others collide with each other in a quest for something intangible, and make glancing blows of emotion during their journey. It's interesting to me that West's novel, though full of tragedy in some sense, is not without humor, and the characters, though gritty, are slightly unreal. It feels to me almost like West has created a sick cartoon of a novel, which is absorbing and full of interesting visual touches, but never quite meant to be taken seriously. It is, however, riveting!

If there is one test that tries all equally, it is the test of time. What is merely a statement of a fad, or a passing whim, quickly fades away. What lasts, thick and thin, good times and bad, passing through fashion and invention and change, proves itself worthy. So has Nathanael West's short novel, "The Day of the Locust," passed its test of time. Written in and about the 1930s, it is a portrait of the most superficial of places: Hollywood. And, aside from progress in computerized special effects and the ever quickening turnaround of superstar marriages and divorces, what has changed about this town and its culture? Ah, nothing. The superficial reigns.

West calls to stage a most colorful array of, some might say, "freaks." But perhaps that is too harsh. These are misfits and fantasizers and wildly hopefuls. There is the actress part-timing as a prostitute, the cowboy without a ranch, the drunken dwarf, the lonely and geekish hotel bookkeeper in stupid devotion to the actress who never quite knows what to do with his immense hands, the screenwriter with a rubber horse in his swimming pool, the obnoxious and precocious child star, and a string of other unusuals that, in Hollywood, are all too usual. Their backdrops and scenarios are no less so: cockfights and porn flick screenings, questionable deaths, business schemes based on anatomy overthinking brain. It's all here. And West handles it all like a fine juggling act, never dropping the ball.

His grand finale is indeed grand. It is what brings to mind the locust. This seething insect that acts en masse and without thinking, following just to follow, stampeding and destroying all in its ravenous path, yet not without eruptions of the grotesque.

Perhaps what makes this all so moving is that Hollywood brings to spotlight what, after all, exists everywhere. Only here it is the stuff of which movies are made. Or, in this case, a masterly piece of fine literature.