E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #81: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust
by Ernie on 17/07/08 at 10:14 am
The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West, 1939. Considered one of the century’s best novels—it made the Modern Library 100—it is also regarded as one of the great novels about Hollywood, displaying the grimy underside and barely-restrained violence beneath the polished glamor of America’s dream mills. The novel portrays Tinseltown as a Golgotha, a place where dreams are manufactured but also where they are sent to die. A disappointed and frustrated populace, too long taunted by the illusions beamed from the silver screen, erupts onto the streets as a swarming mass of rioters. West worked as a screenwriter in the 1930s, and he absorbed the details and themes he would apply in his best known novel (the novella Miss Lonelyhearts [1933], a close second, is an expressionist black comedy set in New York, and an equally relentless depiction of a generation faced with repeated disappointment). Dorothy Parker found The Day of the Locust “brilliant, savage and arresting.” F. Scott Fitzgerald thought it “contained scenes of extraordinary power.” West died in a car crash with his wife the year after publication. The accident occurred the day after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death (Fitzgerald’s unfinished Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon, is often compared with The Day of the Locust). West, a notoriously poor driver, ran a stop sign, and some have suggested that he may have been fatally distracted by the grief he felt at Fitzgerald’s death. The Day of the Locust survives as his greatest achievement—though some may still prefer Miss Lonelyhearts—and its vision of the seamy belly of Hollywood, a land filled to capacity with confused, striving dreamers, endlessly denied the fame and glamor they seek, is no less relevant today than it was when it first appeared. (Bonus fact: the Simpsons animated television show adopted the name Homer Simpson from a sugar daddy character in West’s novel!)
