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Buy The Day of the Locust (Signet Classic) by Nathanael West available and for sale on Brightsurf
| View Larger Image | The Day of the Locust (Signet Classic)
by Nathanael West
| | List Price: | $6.95 |  | | Available: | In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served. | | | | | Sales Rank: | 107013 | | Studio: | Signet Classics | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 208 | | Publication Date: | September 06, 1983 | | Publisher: | Signet Classics |
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CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 43 reviews)
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Still True Today 
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."
June 20, 2008 | |
A better book about Hollywood. . .
Extraordinary!
This is not caricature. This was the "feel" of society--as felt by Nathanael West--in the Hollywood of the 1930s.
More frighteningly, this was, I believe, West's forecast for the "feel" of future American society.
How correct his vision!
March 04, 2008 | |
Wonderful trip through a lost world...
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.
August 18, 2007 | |
Hollywood's Unfulfilled Dreams 
Written in the 1930s in the midst of the Depression, "Day of the Locust" portrays the Hollywood glamour scene from the perspective of the oft forgotten supporting characters. This is, those who came to California with high dreams and have become bitter with resentment and disappointment. The novel is told from the perspective of a recent Yale grad, Tod, who is an aspiring artist who takes a job at a movie studio to pay his bills. Throughout the novel, West masterfully portrays a set of characters, whose twisted dreams and aspirations are intertwined into a delicate web of failure.
Although Tod's psyche may be absent of unrealistic dreams of stardom and he is moderately successful, he lets his infatuation overcome him when he meets a talentless wannabe, Faye Greener. Although she may be living a pipe dream (and sings about getting high, for that matter), her vitality and energy enraptures not just Tod, but a whole set of diverse characters, from a dust-bitten cowboy to a painfully shy Midwesterner. Indeed, her mere presence can begin an undercurrent of sexual tension that manifests itself in a violent fury.
Throughout the novel, Tod uses his imagination to picture the setting for his masterpiece painting, the "Burning of Los Angeles". In his months in Los Angeles, he becomes an acute observer of people, often singling out those who have "come to California to die". This includes not only the wannabe starlets, like Faye, but common laborers from the Midwest and South who came to capture the California dream but have had their dreams relegated to the dustbin.
Overall, West succeeds in showing how the "other half" lived during the heyday of Hollywood, as nary a movie star enters the narrative. This is less a novel about Hollywood and more a novel about unrealistic dreams and their potentially sinister implications if left unfulfilled. Although written more almost seventy years ago, it is still relevant today.
June 29, 2007 | |
Hollywood Depicted as It was In 1939 [73][26]
Interestingly, without any intention, I read this novel immediately after finishing Joan Didion's "Play It As It Lays." Each is a burning indictment of Hollywood - this novel was written in 1939 and "Play" was written in 1970.
Like Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49", the style of this novel is quirky and many of the moments are meant to shock the reader. Some shocks (remember this is a 1939 novel) include a screening of a french pornographic film at one person's house of prostitution, a detailed description of a cock fight at Homer Simpson's (yes that is the character's name) garage, a beautiful actress's (Faye Greener) decision to pay for her father's funeral by employing herself with a silent screen actor's cat house, an incredible depiction of running through a studio's lot where one backdrop falls into another - distanced by centuries and continents from the prior, and an angry dwarf's (Abe Kusich) confrontation with about anyone he meets.
The ending reads heavily. Is it metaphor? Is it purely emblematic? In any event, it is riotous, where the dying mental characters of the novel congregate like frantic sheep and hurt one another in a crowded attempt to "get one glance" at a movie star at the famous movie house where many films are opened - Kahn's Persian Palace Theatre.
The book scoffs Hollywood's allure and sensual delight envisioned by the midwesterners (Homer is from Des Moines, Iowa) and others."Once there, they discover that sunshine isn't enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. 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. . . They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn't any ocean where most of them come from, but after you've seen one wave, you've seen them all."
The protagonist, Tod Hackett, cannot escape the ennui - the malaise - with which he lives. Like Walter Percy's "The Moviegoer", the character's life remains in a funk. Unlike Percy's character, Hackett does not escape the ennui, and becomes one of "them." Those whose ". . . boredom becomes more and more terrible. . . They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing." Life (for all of the characters in this book) is miserable under the golden sun of Hollywood.
This is depressing - but not like Didion's "Play." West does not reach into the mind of the protagonist. Instead, West shows us how unique and simultaneously droll Tod's life can be. One can only wonder if this novel is autobiographical.
May 06, 2007 | |
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