The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Day of the Locust
Book Review: Apocalypse with Palm Trees
Summary: 5 Stars
Too bad Nathanael West didn't live long enough to work with the Coen Brothers! Instead he wrote screenplays for B-grade films in a Hollywood that considered language an obstacle to art. Luckily he also found scraps of time to write five novellas and a couple of stories, and two of those novellas - Day of the Locust & Miss Lonelyhearts - are in a class by themselves, the most original and incisive American fiction of the 1930s.
Day of the Locust is a wild and willful satire of Hollywood and the film industry, a Coen Brothers film in very well-crafted prose, killingly funny and at the same time fearfully sad. The focus character is an artist who has come to Hollywood to escape the art-school banality of painting red barns and lily-pads. Now he's working on a single apocalyptic painting -- "Hollywood in Flames" -- depicting the desperate anomie of "those who have come to California to die." In the foreground of his painting will be all the bizarre hapless cast of people in his own grungy screenplay life. The painting is the novella, and the novella is the painting, a point that many readers seem to have missed. It's a quick read, friends, and a tightly assembled script, and I don't really want to mute the excitement of reading it by blabbing too much of the action.
As a depiction of Southern California as it was in the 1930s, it's worth a thousand books of sociology, rich with sketches of "...the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers - all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence... marching behind his banner in a great unified front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land." Not even Raymond Chandler ever captured the tawdry menace and lurid intoxication of Los Angeles as well as West. Hollywood was truly the Potemkin Village of desires, where everyone was his own leading lady and the next person's 'extra'.
And it's bigger and better-dressed today - Los Angeles, I mean - with the Getty Museum and the Disney Center for the Arts, but anyone who has lived or worked there will know that 'The Day of the Locust' is still a true picture of its permanent impermanence and impending transience.
Book Review: Loony Tunes In Tinseltown
Summary: 3 Stars
Short and easy to read novel depicting the fringes of society. The characters are all misfits and hanger-on's seeking miraculous cures from their failings by basking in the sunshine and glitz of Hollywood. The most beleivable character is an untalented actress and part time prostitute who drives men insane.
The story seemed a bit unreal to me but then so is Hollywood.
Book Review: Still True Today
Summary: 5 Stars
I lived in Southern California during most of the 1980s (San Diego), and after reading this book, I was amazed at how little had changed since 1939, the year this book was published. West draws perfectly the despair and rootless emptiness underlying the pretty smiles, watered landscapes, imported plants and wonderful lifestyles. Reading this book reminded me of how I found the sight of a palm tree disturbing for years after I moved away.
West also insightfully points out that the absurd culture has been produced by the transients, not the long time natives. I remember putting down Southern California in front of a native one time - she became upset and said "You people made it like this."
Book Review: West's finest novel
Summary: 5 Stars
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.