Will I love The Day of the Locust?

One of my favorite novels of any length, Nathanael West’s short 1939 classic is at the very least the most disturbing portrait of Golden Age Hollywood and its hangers-on ever written—hideous, poignant, horribly funny.

West himself wrote scripts for B-movies in the thirties. His death at thirty-three in a car crash was perhaps, in its awful and infuriating ridiculousness, fitting. And it was the day after F. Scott Fitzgerald died.

I love The Day of the Locust because of its scabrous humor.

Nathanael West assembles a cast of eccentrics existing on the margins of Golden Age Hollywood, all with big dreams that turn to dust. 

I love West’s astute perspective on the illusions offered by the film industry—he was a screenwriter with numerous credits. And I love the inchoate rage he depicted among the many attracted to Los Angeles because of the illusions of ease and luxury who found bitter emptiness.

I think of this as a noirish book—a glittering façade that conceals corruption. The cataclysmic ending feels inevitable.  

I’ve read this book a few times, and I honestly can’t tell if it’s a praise or a damning critique of Los Angeles. I think that West–like myself and so many others–is addicted to Los Angeles and is still a bit critical of it.

Tod Hackett is a trained artist who comes to Hollywood to work in set and costume design. Like most outsiders, he sees the city as a projection of all his dreams and nightmares. Set in the 1930s, this book is a moving carnival of outsized stereotypes and winning caricatures. The entire thing feels like a carnival.… show more.

This is one of the first Hollywood novels I ever read and it has stayed with me ever since. This book is great because instead of focusing on superstars, it’s the story of the behind-the-scenes people working in Hollywood, who haven’t hit the big-time yet and are just trying to survive. What makes the book so remarkable is that West could’ve been writing about any industry but uses Hollywood as a metaphor for many of society’s ills that were rampant in the 1930s.

This is the classic Hollywood novel, written by a superb writer who knew the territory. Set in the thirties, it features the minor people who make movies – the extras and out-of-work actors who are nourished by the elusive dream of being discovered and living the life of fame and fortune. The ending is one of the great comic-apocalyptic scenes written about Hollywood or about anywhere else in America.