The Day of the Locust

As always, my review/essay contains all kinds of spoilers, so if you want to read The Day of the Locust without having anything ruined for you, go read it first and then come back. And I highly recommend reading it. It is a rather short book but one that is wonderfully written and culturally weighty, I think.

Reading Nathanael West's Day of the Locust is exactly why I love this project. It is quite possible that without this reading quest I would never have discovered this incredible writer or this thoughtful novel.

Like many of my favorite novels, Day of the Locust places its characters in a particular cultural moment and the two are thoroughly intertwined. West is able to tell a compelling story and make a larger comment on American society without ever feeling pretentious or ridiculous. West does what Tod thinks painter Alessandro Magnasco would do with his subjects: "He would not satirize them as Hogarth or Dumier might, nor would he pity them. He would paint their fury with respect, appreciating its awful, anarchic power and aware that they had it in them to destroy civilization." Like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Anderson, and others of his time, West keeps a neutral, distant tone that respects both the characters and the readers while showing us something deep in the ways of human beings.

In a lot of ways, this novel reminded me of The Great Gatsby; only, it's The Great Gatsby turned on its head. Nick Carraway and Tod Hackett are both observers of the drama surrounding them, and both are involved without actually creating any of the drama. Nick is a transplant in the east coast, moved to New York to be a part of the financial heart of the country. Tod is a transplant on the west coast, moved to L.A., to be a part of the entertainment heart of the country. Fitzgerald uses his novel to comment on the excesses of the culture and the role that finances and wealth play in that corruption. West uses his novel to comment on the excesses of the culture and the role that entertainment and movies play in that corruption. But where Fitzgerald takes us into the lives of those who are at the center of wealth and the cultural scene, West plays around the outskirts of the entertainment industry, with the extras, the vaudevillian actors, and all those hovering on the edges.

West is quite explicit in his cultural analysis at the end of the novel when the riot breaks out in Hollywood and Tod connects that riot to the painting he has been working on through the entirety of the novel, "The Burning of Los Angeles." The masses have been lulled into working and working so that they can buy some leisure time and partake in the American Dream, but when they actually get there, they see how hollow it all is and they become restless, bored:

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that
they have been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of
their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies.
Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks,
love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet
made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't
titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough
to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated
and betrayed. They have saved and saved for nothing.

Hackett notes that "all those poor devils . . . can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence." And it's important to note that the riot is one of the middle class: "Tod could see very few people who looked tough, nor could he see any working me. The crowd was made up of the lower middle classes."

In some ways the riot at the end of the novel was jarring, because West had focused on individuals up to that point, not on masses of people. But what this technique does is cause you to reevaluate what you have read up to this point, to comb back through the novel and see the world hovering around the edges of Faye, Harry, Tod, Earle, Miguel, and Homer. And in doing so, we see that we have only been looking at a corner of West's canvas, picking out individual faces in a crowd. The ending is like a an epic pull-back of a camera in a movie, showing us the full landscape of destruction for the first time.

The whole is written upon the parts, however, I believe, and the individual characters echo the larger world of the novel. Faye, or instance, is like Hollywood and the dream that keeps everyone coming out and staying in L.A. It is obvious to everyone what she is. Tod sees right through her but wants her all the same. She is promiscuous, but he sees something innocent as well. She is not bright, but he sees that she has moments of self-awareness. Everyone flocks around her like those chasing the dream. Homer is the hard working lower middle class that saves and saves and is left only with boredom and disappointment. West consistently describes him as a poorly constructed automaton who is made up of disparate parts that don't talk to each other. His hands are alive and act by themselves, just like the crowd is made up of all these parts but act with one destructive force. And for as gentle and restrained as Homer is, one day that rock will strike him in the face and he will explode and destroy, beating adore without thought or mercy. His explosion of course mirrors the riot that sweeps Todd away.

What amazes me is that West does all this while simultaneously creating real characters and an absorbing story. This is not a political tract dressed up like a novel; this is a novel with a social conscience. And still more amazingly, West's critique feels like it could just have easily been made yesterday as over 70 years ago.

When this list is done (in five years?) I will definitely come back to read West's Miss Lonelyhearts, which is paired with The Day of the Locust in my edition. So wonderful!