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The Day of the Locust
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Nathanael West
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Literature & Fiction
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Signet Classics
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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.
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