As some of you know, I came dangerously close to packing it in and moving to Los Angeles this winter. I'm from California originally, but the other California, up the Five a ways and then off to the left.... Where I grew up people speak of LA in the same disgusted, dismissive, and morbidly fascinated tones they used to talk about Michael Jackson before he died. The Bay Area is majorly creeped-out by the weirdo plastic-surgery-disaster-of-dubious-morals that is Los Angeles. We hate it for its car culture I guess (though we drive up there too), maybe a little for the vapidly sunny weather (ours isn't bad either), but really what we hate its Entertainment Industry and everything related, everything that represents. We are deeply suspicious and insanely resentful of the mindless, soulless crap produced by Hollywood, of shallow surface beauty, of glitzy superficiality and the tinseled-out dreams and the depressing nightmares we vaguely suspect they must engender. According to Berkeley, LA is full of beautiful idiots who are banally bad people; we, on the other hand, are homely, unkempt, sincere neurotics who drink great coffee and ride our bestickered bikes earnestly to independent bookstores. We are a trustworthy people that judges men, women, or otherwise-gender-identified individuals based on their progressive political views and doctoral dissertations, not on the size of their chests, their last picture's gross, or the sparkle of their smiles! LA is soul-killing. And it's boring and ugly.Anyway, I'm getting a little off-topic here, but I wanted to give some background about my personal programming regarding Hell-A, and especially my horror of Hollywood and its spawn. People in New York are sometimes freaked out by LA but for sort of different reasons -- or in a different way, in any case -- and it was only when I'd tell old Bay Area friends I was moving that their visceral horror drove home the insanity of what I had planned."Why would you ever move there????!" they would cry. "The driving, ugh, and.... the.... the people.... the MOVIE PEOPLE! They're all MOVIE PEOPLE!!!""I know, I know," I'd say. "But I love the weather." It was February in New York and I wanted to kill myself. "And I really, really, really miss.....""You miss...?""I miss the produce."This is the truth. I nearly moved to Los Angeles in large part because I haven't eaten a decent fruit or vegetable in six years. This is one of those things you just take for granted growing up in California: that pretty much any produce you buy is grown reasonably close and fairly recently, and that large quantities of it can be easily procured, pretty much anywhere, all year round. This is simply not the case in New York City. The first time I saw lettuce in a supermarket here, I almost started crying. It looked like something that had been strangled by a serial killer in the Central Valley, stuffed in the trunk of a battered Impala, driven to Brooklyn the long way (via Mexico?), dumped in an alley behind the store, chewed on by some rats, rejected by them, then brought inside and offered for sale at something like $3 a head. This kind of lettuce is fairly standard here. Of course, if you're willing to shell out serious cash you can get something prettier, but you'll notice that will have been grown in California too, if it's even domestic. I know how shitty I feel after traveling across the country, and I don't want eat something that's undergone that ordeal. My solution to dealing with this situation has been to stop eating vegetables, so I basically just survive on pizza and bagels (which are both way better here), and by smoking a pack of mentholated cigarettes whenever I get an artichoke craving.Anyway, for reasons too unbearably shocking and sordid to get into here, I did not wind up moving to LA, so I'm still here in New York. This took some adjustment, especially since it's been late March for about five months now: it just rains all the time and is generally shitty. I spend one-to-three hours every day in an underground tunnel, usually with my face pressed into some stranger's reeking armpit. I trudge through the streets like a goddamn mule, with my bookbag over one shoulder, gym stuff on the other, feeling incredibly frumpy and oppressed. I stagger miles in my heels with my life on my back, usually in the rain, having graphic fantasies about what it must like to have a trunk. A trunk in one's car, which one drives to the supermarket and loads up with Trader Joe's junkfood and a bounty of produce.... fresh, inexpensive, delicious produce, full of nutrients and joy.....Okay, so the other day I got off work, and you know what? It wasn't raining. Finally. And I felt pretty good! I left work and stopped by my friend's bar in Tribeca to shoot the shit a little on the way to my gym, then left him with a little spring in my step, thinking well, this New York City livin' ain't really so bad! It's nice to be able to live one's life on foot, to pay social calls and run errands in a glamorous neighborhood, and who cares it's one so chichi I'd never be able to live there, no matter what unexpected turns my life happens to take? I can stroll from my office, stop and visit a friend, stroll onto the gym and then do a nice long run up alongside the Hudson River. Is this really so bad? It is not. It is not!I felt some kind of something settle in me then, and at that moment I made a new kind of peace with staying in New York. You can have quality of life in this city, I thought, as the summer evening sunshine fell on the cobblestone streets.... and then there, as if to reward me, as I turned the corner, was a huge gorgeous sign for the Tribeca Farmers Market.My heart actually did swell at this point, like it does when the music goes in some great old movie. I've never quite understood why there isn't a Tribeca Farmers Market, seeing as how it's um, the epicenter for well-heeled baby producers who live for just that sort of thing. And this was really the farmers market to end all farmers markets! Like pretty much everything in Tribeca, it gleamed with a patina of expensive specialness that made you just want to buy it. And because it was new, it wasn't crowded at all, even though it was huge, and really seemed to have everything. I don't really go to the Farmers Markets around here too much, mostly because they all seem to close down before I get off work, and then the ones that don't -- like the closest one to me, Saturdays in Park Slope -- always seem to be some big clusterfuck of strollers and pushing, and require a lot more planning and stamina than I feel they're worth.But this Tribeca one was great. All the produce looked incredible, heaped up in these jewel-toned piles of locally-grown, organic goodness. Apples, carrots, greens, onions.... handmade honey, handmade cheese, handmade yogurt, handmade colorful signs in the stalls, all of it just real beautiful and so picturesque. And I strolled through this slowly, not stopping yet, just taking it in as I blissfully thought: "Oh, fuck you, Los Angeles! New York has it all. This place is amazing. Why would I leave, when everything's here? I can live here no problem.... and I won't starve!"I was walking behind these two Scandinavian tourists who'd stopped a little ahead of me to talk to one of the farmers. And what a farmer this guy was! The loveliest farmer for the loveliest farmers market, he was straight from Central Casting: eyes twinkling in his kindly weathered face, greying hair peeking out from his slightly battered fruit-selling hat and curling down over his sun-reddened ears. I slowed down to hear what he was telling the women, who now seemed to be looking around in confusion. The farmer had just said something about Jennifer Lopez."Wait, what?" I interrupted. That's when I noticed the lady with the clipboard who'd just started yelling. "Did you just say this is a set?"The farmer grinned and shrugged apologetically. "We're making a movie.""Of course you are...." I mumbled, shoulders sagging suddenly from the weight of my bags. "Of course there's no Tribeca Farmers Market.""I wish there was," the farmer said. "Try Union Square?""PLACES!" the woman with the clipboard shrieked.The farmer headed back to his stall, and I split. As I stalked down the block, furiously spinning the ball of my Blackberry (the only fruit there's no shortage of in this town, apparently) an LA-looking type clearly crapping his linen pants screamed in my face. "I've got a camera coming through here! Who's letting all these goddamn people walk on this street?""Oh fuck you," I snarled. "I live here. Go back to LA!"So I was really mad when this happened, but pretty soon afterwards I decided I liked it. I decided something else, too, which is that LA is great because Hollywood's great, and Hollywood's great because it's such a wonderful, durable, flexible metaphor. You know the cliche about how things become cliches? The Hollywood metaphor's a great cliche. It's like a basic formulaic plot that's been used a thousand times, and actually a surprisingly large number of movies and books based on it are pretty fabulous. The Day of the Locust isn't the best of them, but it's notable in part because it was written fairly early -- 1939 -- but more because West's own cocktail of sparkling style and abject nihilism is so well-suited to the topic.This book has aged in a couple jarring ways -- like that one of the characters is named Homer Simpson, which you'd think would be fun but for me was actually a terrible distraction. The story is the basic Hollywood-eats-your-soul plot, I guess, except it's extremely bleak and depraved and hardcore and almost psychedelic.... and really lovely and beautiful in a certain kind of way. I didn't think it was the greatest thing ever, and actually They Shoot Horses Don't They? made a much bigger impact on me, though this take on Hollywood in the thirties was way more Literary and more specifically about Hollywood. The Day of the Locust is ultimately a weird but sturdy little black comedy that should be mandatory summer reading for anyone with an interest in Hollywood and riffs on its themes.... which should be most people, really.Why? Because we were totally wrong about LA, growing up in the Bay Area. The entertainment industry isn't a dull, fluffy, fun date movie that's too dumb to think about. Hollywood is ten thousand times more fucked-up and fascinating than anything in Berkeley, and that's why LA's amazing. We didn't get what Hollywood was, looking down at it from the North and thinking there was nothing there beneath all that surface. There's shit crawling around like crazy under the glitter and makeup, which has been pointed out so many times because it truly is a great theme. Hollywood is a fake Farmers Market when you hate your life and you just need fresh greenbeans. Hollywood is fake sets and fake people and gorgeous canyons full of flowers, and aspiring slutty starlets and cynical desperate men and sleazy Racing Form dwarves and cockfighting cowboys and sexy Mexicans and bizarre out-of-place costumes and studios and tequila and rapes and illegal abortions and frightening stage mothers of psychotic child actors and riots and murders and fifty other kinds of insanity..... I'm flipping through and remembering this is actually a pretty awesome book. David Lynch could do an amazing adaptation of this. Why hasn't he? It'd be deadly.Okay, that's enough procrastination for one night, or maybe even for a lifetime. I'm going to go eat some withered spinach out of a bag now, and cry myself to sleep.
"Except for the Romola Martin incident and perhaps one or two other widely spaced events, the forty years of [Homer's] life had been entirely without variety or excitement."Unfortunately, this book is also entirely without those things. Maybe that's not entirely fair as the book does have some vivid scenes: a visit to a Hollywood studio during the filming of a Napoleonic battle scene, a depressing cock-fight, a brawl in which a little person strikes a violent below-the-belt blow. However, the author fails to tie these scenes together because (a) we fail to care about any of the characters and (b) there's little discernible conflict or plot aside from the psychopathic 17-year-old's desire to be a starlet and the desire of all the book's deranged men to sleep with her. As someone who grew up in Northern California, I appreciate that West wanted to mock all things associated with Los Angeles. However, even the harshest of satires need at least one character that the reader can sympathize with somewhat. Also, I find his lack of subtlety irritating. For example, here’s a description of a house from chapter seven:“The house was queer… This door was of gumwood painted like fumed oak and it hung on enormous hinges. Although made by machine, the hinges had been carefully stamped to appear hand-forged. The same kind of care and skill had been used to make the roof thatching, which was not really straw but heavy fireproof paper colored and ribbed to look like straw. … In the fireplace was a variety of cactus made of rubber and cork… The table held a lamp with a paper shade, oiled to look like parchment… There was a spool bed made of iron grained like wood…and a Governor Winthrop dresser painted to look like unpainted pine.”Okay. We get it: everything in Los Angeles is fake. You don’t need to beat us over the head with it. And the sad thing is that this is one of the book’s best passages: even though it’s repetitive, it has an amount of meaning behind it that’s lacking in the rest of the book. The rest of the book is largely consists of West trotting out one horrible character after another. For that kind of heavy, plot-less satire, I think West would’ve been better served writing a short story rather than an entire novel. The fact this work was included on the Modern Library’s “100 best English-language novels of the 20th century” and Time magazine’s “100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005” makes me think less of both lists.
What do You think about The Day Of The Locust (1983)?
I know this is supposed to be #73 on a list of best English language novels of the 20th century and that TIME magazine included it in the top 100 novels written between 1923 and 2005, but I didn't like it. I found it an ugly book and I didn't care about any of the characters, all of whom are part of the seedy side of Los Angeles during the Depression. One of the key characters is Homer Simpson, long before Matt Groening was a twinkle in his mother's eye. The hero of the piece is Tod Hackett, who works as a movie costume designer and scene painter and lives in a little bungalo out in the valley with his friend Homer (who is somewhat similar in intellect to the cartoon character). Tod meets and falls in love with aspiring starlet (and sometime prostitute) Faye Greuning* and through her and her father, an out of work actor (who eventually dies), Tod is introduced to a cast of ne'er do well characters. It is a good picture of the time, but it was an ugly time and the picture is an ugly picture. I finished it, since it is the book we will discuss at our next book club meeting, but I didn't enjoy it.*I wonder if Faye's last name had any bearing on Matt's decision to base The Siimpsons on Homer, years later.
—Bev
Don't you hate it when you finally read a book you have been looking forward to read for years and it turns out to be a massive disappointment?Such is the case with Day of the Locusts. I remember seeing the film many years ago and loving it. I should like this book: it is set in a city and period of history I love reading about. Hollywood 1930s. The writing is beautiful in parts and the observations of humanity timeless. I just wish something actually happened of interest to these characters. It is though West has written character studies rather than a story. What are their motivations, their back stories to shed light on the present? At only 200 odd pages I couldn't believe what a chore it was to get through to the end.One good thing came of this - I now know where the name Homer Simpson came from :)
—Alex
I felt as though I’d clicked on TCM and was watching a film with one of those actors whose name you can’t recall, yet you know you’ve seen him in…oh, what’s the name of that other movie? I zipped through The Day of the Locust in no time, feeling as though I’d read it before, yet knowing I had not.It’s Hollywood in the ’30′s with a cast of characters as unique as those found there today; retired vaudevillians, dwarf bookies, cock fighting cowboys, wannabe actors and of course, the femme fatale. Witness the madness that is Hollywood through drunken eyes, dying sighs and men driven mad by an out a reach beauty. West was clearly disillusioned after moving to Hollywood to write scripts, but that disappointment manifested itself with the publication of The Day of the Locust.Tod Hackett, the novel’s central character most closely resembles West himself. After working for only 3 months in Hollywood, he acquires an unusual assortment of acquaintances and quickly sees their downfalls as precursors to his own ruin. And he falls for the girl he’ll never have. Clue-She tells him he’s not rich enough and not really too good looking either. To this he takes no offense…The much sought after, Faye Greener, believes she will be a famous Hollywood star. Okay, so she’s only 17 and hasn’t had her dreams shattered yet so we must give her some leeway. She claims to want a rich and handsome man, yet she is always surrounded by those she deems unworthy. So why is she not elsewhere? Maybe she’s not as clueless as she behaves.The transplanted hotel accountant from Iowa, Homer Simpson (yes, that is his name) is in Hollywood on doctor’s orders. His life is ordered and completely uneventful until Faye’s father shows up at his door peddling silver polish. Once Faye steps in, it is clear she has found a whipping post. Homer takes Faye in after her father dies and waits on her as though she were a guest at a hotel rather than someone down on her luck. She then moves her male friends into the garage with parties and cockfights on the agenda. Let’s just say, things don’t end well.Quotes:Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, like Homer, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them. They usually know this, but still can’t help crying.Would I love to hang with a man whose circle included William Carlos Williams and Dashiell Hammett? Why yes, I would. West captured the desperation of those who travelled to California with dreams that were quickly smothered in The Day of the Locust. I’d love to talk with him about his time in New York and ask if he could share any tips he got from his pals.My rating for The Day of the Locust is an 8 out of 10.
—Veronica
