Admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, and hailed as one of the “Best 100 English-language novels” by Time magazine, The Day of the Locust continues to influence American writers, artists, and culture. Bob Dylan wrote the classic song “Day of the Locusts” in homage and Matt Groening’s Homer Simpson is named after one of its characters. No novel more perfectly … captures the nuttier side of Hollywood. Here the lens is turned on its fringes — actors out of work, film extras with big dreams, and parents lining their children up for small roles. But it’s the bit actress Faye Greener who steals the spotlight with her wildly convoluted dreams of stardom: “I’m going to be a star some day–if I’m not I’ll commit suicide.”
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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 like this that has so much depth is that the next few books I read will pale in comparison.
David Putnam Author of The Bruno Johnson series
Talented artist Tod Hackett has relocated to Los Angeles where he is working as a movie set designer. Tod develops an infatuation for Faye – a beautiful, blonde and brazen aspiring actress, and sometime call girl. When her father, a vaudevillian reduced to selling silver polish door-to-door, dies of a heart-attack, Faye goes to live with Homer Simpson, a kind-hearted, clumsy, middle-aged man, who dotes on her. There is also a belligerent and bad-tempered actor dwarf, a handsome and sullen down-on-his-luck cowboy called Earle, his Mexican friend Miguel, and an obnoxious kid star.
Published in 1939, The Day of the Locust is a short, plotless and poignant novel with a surreal aspect that is prescient in its prediction of the Hollywood-obsessed society of today, with its fixation on celebrity and image. This is a world of empty promises and broken dreams for the book’s disparate characters, most notably Tod and Homer, for whom materialistic, vapid and fickle Faye’s titillations lead only to frustration and disappointment.
The book’s subject matter, its author’s turn of phrase and the vivid descriptions, most memorably of a cockfight, appealed to this reader.
There’s always been something wrong with Hollywood. We were again reminded of this during the Harvey Weinstein trial — and again every time a star dies young, as happened with Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Sharon Tate, Natalie Wood, River Phoenix, Brittany Murphy, Heath Ledger and so on. But it goes back even farther than that, to Hollywood’s origins, and West’s 1939 The Day of the Locust serves as proof. One thing we also mustn’t forget is that when the ’29 market crash happened, and millions of people lost everything, the road they took in order to find jobs in California’s fruit orchards — like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath — was Route 66 which crossed right through the Dust Bowl and practically ended at the Hollywood sign. So America’s poorest and most profoundly and suddenly disenfranchised were winding up right on the doorstep of our richest celebrities. This absurdity is one that West exploits for his ending. He’s only known for this book and one other, Miss Lonelyhearts. He is also known for his absurd death, at only 37, in traffic on his way to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s funeral. Miss Lonelyhearts appeared in 1932 and reads a little like a grotesque Gatsby, though an explicitly sexual and violent one. His Hollywood novel is also a grotesque, not so much about the star machine but more about those it was chewing up and spitting out even in the 30s. So it’s the story of Homer Simpson — no connection to the animated series — and a bit cowboy actor named Earle, and a not-talented-enough actress named Faye, and a Mexican friend of Earle’s named Miguel, and Faye’s washed-up Vaudevillian father, Harry, and an aging child star named Adore. Every character is an unemployed outcast from B-movies, some of whom are doomed to turn up at a movie premiere for a film very similar to The Grapes of Wrath, which becomes a riot that kills some of the heroes. This book makes a great pairing with Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, by the way, which gives us an uneasy look at Hollywood a generation later, in the 60s, this time from the point of view of a female hero.