Tod Hackett, a fresh Yale art grad, is the first character we met in Nathanael West’s zany, wild, and thoroughly amusing novel about Hollywood culture in the 1930s. Along with his job as a set designer, Hackett spends his time working on a painting he hopes will become his masterpiece, one that he’s already decided to call “The Burning of Los Angeles.” There’s never any doubt that The Day of the Locust will make good on this fiery foreshadowing, but the interactions between the novel’s troubled and eccentric characters add enough twists, turns, and drama to make West’s 1939 novel a page-turner.
It’s no coincidence that West was able to capture Hollywood culture with the power and depth that he did; he moved there in 1935 after being offered a job as a script writer. He was in daily contact with the kinds of assorted characters that come so vividly to life in this compact novel.
Yet one doesn’t need to have ever stepped foot in Hollywood to recognize these characters. We know the types. These are people angling for fame and glamor and wealth; people who have divested their hopes in a glitzy realm of motion pictures, banking on the less than reasonable belief that their dreams will become as real as the sun that warms the Hollywood Hills.
Silly, perhaps, but the movie industry can be awfully tempting, not to mention deceiving. Behind the dazzling frontispiece of Hollywood is a second world—a much less kind one—that can dry a soul out. And to varying degrees, many of the characters experience exactly that, though few, if any, seem to be consciously aware of it.
Instead, they pursue their ambitions with little specific aim or actual forethought, all the while becoming slaves to external validation and developing an inability to even envision their lives outside the construct of Hollywood.
One character, Harry Greener, old and declining in health, can’t let go of his prior life as an actor, which amounts to a less than stellar career: “forty years in vaudeville and burlesque.” Yet he’s completely stuck in the past, performs his ridiculous skits in front of any willing (and unwilling) onlookers, and sells homemade silver polish door-to-door as a source of income.
For a novel about Hollywood, it may seem odd that this type of pitiable, almost pathetic, character is far the only one to be found between the book’s covers. And it may seem even more odd that nary a superstar appears in The Day of the Locust.
At least, not per se. Superstars are there all right, but only in the distant background, inhabiting a rarefied sphere of Hollywood that the characters in this novel are not a part of and will never be a part of. The seductive power of Hollywood, after all, draws far more eager participants than it can—and wants—to turn into stars.
A regrettable and sad state of affairs for all the outcasts and losers in this game of fame, but do such characters and their longings constitute an actual danger to the society they inhabit?
For a good stretch of the book, most of the characters seem pretty harmless. Naïve and ridiculous and vain though they may be, their putzing around and attachment to unattainable dreams seem fairly innocuous.
Yet stifled energies and an air of unsettledness invades nearly every scene, and never more so than in those containing Faye Greener (daughter of the Mr. Greener mentioned above), and the attention bestowed on her.
A blond bombshell and aspiring A-list actress, the stage is second nature to her. As she tells a screenwriter at a party, “Acting is in my blood. We Greeners, you know, were all theatre people from away back.” It may be in their blood, but unfortunately that’s the only place it seems to be, since her father’s career was a flop, and she herself apparently has very little talent.
But she does have her looks, which she isn’t afraid to use when she’s in the mood for attention. And after all, this is Hollywood; talent matters, but so does alluring beauty. Uncomfortably, though, she’s also just 17, a fact that is mentioned just once and can be easy to forget as the novel goes on.
Faye gets the attention not just of Tod Hackett (who moves into her apartment building after catching a glimpse of her), but also of Homer Simpson (a retired bookkeeper from Iowa who’s come to California for a rest, per his doctor’s advice), and Earle and Miguel, two friends pop up a little later in the novel.
To the extent that there’s a plot in The Day of the Locust, it revolves around Faye and her infatuated suitors. Little genuine romance is ever involved, however, owing in part to Faye’s rather specific approach to relationships: “she could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her.” How’s that for the ethos of an aspiring Hollywood actress?
At any rate, it puts the older Homer Simpson in the game, despite his giving off the impression of being someone “sleep-walking or partially blind.” Yet there does seem to be one part of him aching to come alive: his hands.
Some of Nathanael West’s best sentences occur when describing little moments or gestures, as in the case of Homer’s hands when he puts them into a sink of cold water: “They lay quietly on the bottom like a pair of strange aquatic animals. When they were thoroughly chilled and began to crawl about, he lifted them out and hid them in a towel.”
Along with Faye and her group of male admirers, there are minor characters in The Day of the Locust that West uses to paint a broader picture of Hollywood and the many different people it manages to wrangle in.
There’s the child actor Adore Loomis, for example, who performs on command from his domineering, self-serving mother, who wants nothing more in life than to see her eight-year-old child make it big. Adore pops up in only two or three scenes, but when he does, they’re telling and eventful. Unfortunately for little Adore—who’s been prodded by his obnoxious mother his entire life—these scenes sometimes turn out in ways that are far from anticipated.
The Day of the Locust, in its depiction of Hollywood, is a novel with few equals. But its real power lies not merely in depicting the culture of the motion picture industry, but in showing how human beings are so perpetually prone to being sucked into glitzy facades—facades which, spellbinding and alluring as they may be, are no more dependable than a shoddy movie set.
Spectatio 