Novella November: Plague Of Hollywood Locusts

"I'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her. "It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want. If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.”

At one point in my life I wanted to be an actress.

Yeah, when have you not heard that line? But seriously, I wanted to be one because of what I naively thought it represented --- you know --- fame, wealth, glamour, prestige, insta-acceptance, the chance to act with Benicio Del Toro (sorry, I love me some Benicio Del Toro). I even did theater for three years in high school just to see if I had what it takes to become a true thespian. Within a few years of being an understudy-turned-sound-director-turned-make-up-artist, I realized that just because my mother calls me a "drama queen" doesn’t make me an actress cause the fact stands that I'm a terrible actress. Truly terrible. Trust me, I'm someone who thrives better behind the scenes, not front and center.

For this, to some extent, I envied the stage kids, the kids who could cry on cue and who sung show tunes with colorful gusto at the drop of a fedora. These kids, my classmates, were going to be ACTORS, maybe not famous ones, but they were excelling at my girlhood fantasy to be a bronze Meryl Streep. Still, I think I admired them more for how they had the same teeth-grinding spirit I now have about writing. No matter what happened, they were never going to stop acting, never going to extinguish their dreams no matter how many bit parts, failed auditions, and false hopes they encountered. They held out hope that one day all the struggle and sweat would be worth it.

But what happens when reality sets in? When those bit parts never transpire? When your dream is deferred and denied over and over again into a webbed net of jaded insanity?

You get The Day of the Locust.


Within the stifling, suffocating hot orange backdrop of 1930’s California, Nathanael West conveys Hollywood as pure misery business. It’s a dry dystopia of garish spectacles who bite and claw, scrimp, and pimp themselves to give a ravenous, needy public disenchanted by the Depression something to emulate and believe in, even when they themselves aren’t the model citizens to be admired.

Past any form of redemption, these characters inhabit a world of smoke, mirrors, and false smiles. To them the movies go beyond escapism, it's an artistic form of personalized reincarnation --- or in worse case scenarios --- a brutal confirmation of their mediocrity as entertainers and as citizens of the human race.

"Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, 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."

This book is like rubbernecking around a nightmare. It’s an extended creature feature of faces, names, and places, all of which don’t make sense, but have definite outlines. You know what they represent, but you’re not entirely sure because they walk a thin tightrope between make-believe and reality, much like movies themselves. While reading I was reminded a lot of one of my all-time favorite novels, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy. It has the same 'misfits wandering aimless in a cruel city' vibe and it’s just as dark. It also emphasizes that the city itself is a physical, breathing character. Like it, the city is the entity that alters the character’s identities and beliefs. The city is the one that inflicts abuse, that lies and brings disillusionment to whomever has hopes that its zip code will provide opportunity and salvation. While Midnight Cowboy shivers in a cruel East Coast winter and is seen through twilight black and blues eyes, The Day of Locust has a harsh technicolor palette that even a pair of shades can't subdue.

West's prose really shines when he allows the City of Los Angeles to take center stage. Buildings from churches to apartment houses begin to resemble gigantic concrete tombs or stuffy, immovable coffins. Adobes may have views of wide open spaces and shorelines, but inside they are cluttered with fake décor that is either painted or assembled to "look" like the real thing. Even the fruit and meats in a supermarket display are awash in vivid neon artifice. West captivates and disturbs the reader with such attention to detail.

If the city was bad enough, the characters within it are just as deplorable. Drunks, wannabes, lonely hearts, deformed defects, immature delinquents --- the gang is all here and hanging onto the tattered shreds of their lives all while the quicksand gurgles around them.

True to the book's title, this tale is infested with a plague of winged nuisances: There is Faye Greener, an untalented actress who wants to be famous even if it kills her; Faye’s father Harry Greener who is a grizzled and failed vaudeville clown who chases his past, but who never catches up to it as he is condemned to sell silver polish door-to-door; Homer Simpson (yes, our favorite doughnut swallowing cartoon sloth is named after him) is a lonely transplant from Iowa who seeks California’s proposed tranquility and becomes a human doormat for Faye to step upon; "Honest" Abe Kusich, a diminutive and cantankerous bookie whose insecurity about his size makes him foul and friendless; Adore Loomis, a monstrous child actor, trained so by his fame hungry mother, Maybelle; Earle Shoop, a washed-up cowboy actor who adores Faye, but whose thirst for violence out-rules everything; Miguel, a Mexican wanderer who trains cocks to fight, and who snags the attentions of the naïve Faye; Claude Estee, a screenwriter who fades into the onslaught of larger-than-life characters he creates; Mrs. Jennings, a madam who runs the “best little whorehouse” in Los Angeles and does so “shrewdly but with taste”.

Narrating this grotesque showcase is Tod Hackett, a recruit from the Yale School of Fine Arts who works as a set and costume designer. He's the Nick Carraway of this Gatsby-like celluloid tale as he observes all these sad sacks through his lens of cynical amusement in order to utilize them as inspiration for his “masterpiece” painting dubbed: "The Burning of Los Angeles".

Nihilistic in its nature, The Day of the Locust is a character study as it is a critique of Hollywood's seedy underbelly. It's more concerned with throwing out symbolism than it is about storytelling. Events happen, but it’s in snapshots, freeze frames, all of them slithering around without much context. Some scenes play out in swathes and stretches as they mimic panoramic shots seen in an epic budget-breaking film. Some of these scenes are heavy-handed, but they are necessary to show how our anti-heroes navigate a fabricated and vile dream world. There's an impressive scene where Tod navigates the studio backlots, going from the Wild West to the hills of Napoleon's last stand at Waterloo. The scene is riveting as it is laborious, dreamlike as it is grueling and perfectly captures how episodic this book is. The more brutal snapshots come in the form of a horrific cockfighting match and the book's final coda that pans in on an inky, suffocating mob of fans and surveyors at a movie premiere.

I find myself being repetitive in my praise of West's word play. It's just so on-point on how layered and poetic it is. He paints the bittersweet masquerade of life so well, turning a severe fluorescent light on everything that is beautiful or mundane in order to distort it for deeper inspection (Faye is a towering femme fatale with "sword-like legs", but then West tops her with a virginal child-like blue bow her true age and level of maturity becomes apparent; the landscapes are panoramic and beautiful, but West has them outlined in "violet neon-piping" or in striking colors of silver, rose, orange, and chocolate like an eye-jarring pop art painting).

"Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stagehands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed.”

Faye Greener is quite a character. It is easy to hate her for how she uses and abuses people, but you begin to understand her and discover that she was raised to lack social graces and cave into her own exploitation because she had the misfortune of being the daughter of a peddler like Harry. Same goes for the impish child star Adore Loomis who is like a vindictive ventriloquist dummy come to life, this thanks to him being polished and posed by his doltish mother. These characters can't help their crass and uncouth behavior, but there they are inflicting their ignorance and unpleasantness on everybody. You feel sorrier for outsiders like Homer as he seeks love in all the wrong places and whose lack of mental stability can only produce agony to where you wonder if his being around such terrible people is self-abuse in itself. Even that hobgoblin Harry is someone to pity because nothing is sadder than seeing a person on a decades-long hamster wheel of fail.

Tod is supposed to be our 'trusted' tour guide who fashions himself as a vanilla everyman, but really, he's an unreliable narrator of the worst kind. He's someone who fancies himself as a "moral person" who is just on the sidelines observing. Someone who wants to utilize and immortalize these caricatures all for the 'honest' sake of art. He is so entertained by his new "friends" to where he becomes a part of the ugly picture himself and his true colors are revealed to be far from looking like a rainbow. Tod is simply an awful person. He’s the quintessential "Nice Guy". He’s that passive-aggressive asshat who swears up and down he's such a "nice and great guy", but it's those "bitches" that turn him down that are "crazy" since he's such a "great catch".

For most of the book, Tod lusts after Faye and takes her continuous rejections towards him as a signal to "try harder". He believes that her flaunting her shapely body is an open invitation to rape and occupy. Of course I fidgeted in remembrance of past "Nice Guys" I've encountered and you bet my feminist heart was ablaze every time Tod's mind dwelled into turgid rape fantasies, but West isn’t trying to make you comfortable or have you agree or sympathize with this sordid behavior. He's calling out the sausage factory and noting their lack of self-control whenever it comes to sexualizing the opposite sex. He's saying these men may be dashing and cavalier on camera, but once the film stops rolling they too are capable of inciting violence towards women, in turn, killing the fantasy and sunshine that Hollywood represents. For women, West looks at how femininity is grossly eroticized in media, and how women can easily fall into traps. West also lays down a case for how women can be completely aware such actions, sometimes even using it to their advantage as we see Mrs. Jennings making profit with her "cathouse" business and Faye having a passive take on sex to where she'll be a casting couch princess in no time.

At the time of its publication, The Day of the Locust was probably an eye-opening experience for people who loved the lie that is Hollywood. Back when this was written celebrities' private lives were often fudged or hidden from the lauding public. We only found out about such reputation-killing behaviors when the parties involved were either deceased or if someone scribbled it out in a ghostwritten memoir 30 years after the fact. Now in the Internet generation we air dirty laundry daily and at rapid speeds. We have websites that update themselves by the minute and are dedicated to following the activities of celebrities daily lives in microscopic detail. We have the truth serum that is Twitter which can end a pristine legacy in just 140 characters or less. We've got Kim Kardashian, a modern day Faye Greener, who actually became famous for using her sex. We've now seen tear-stained interviews with broken child stars and violated starlets who tell tales of how Hollywood is a front for pedophilia and sexual exploitation. Also in this era we often see the celebrities themselves incite their own scandals through social media, because scandal no matter how atrocious still guarantees 15 minutes (or more) of fame.

If Nathanael West had lived to see Hollywood now, I'd wonder what he'd say, but then again, he called it already as his prediction in The Day of the Locust is even more wildly truthful than he probably imagined. This prediction is what makes this book ugly, convoluted, and outlandish. It’s seeped in truth --- and the truth is just that--- ugly, convoluted, and outlandish. It’s a book that warrants a spoonful of sugar after the fact to allow the medicine of reality go down as this isn't light, camp reading. A frothy reality show it isn't, as it doesn't have filter or goes by a heavily edited script. This book doesn't bullshit around and I like that. Sure a lot of what is written is ham-fisted and it gets a little long-winded and manic towards the end to where it becomes difficult to follow at times, but I chalked up the story spinning out of control to allude to the characters slipping mentally to where they became less human and more like the meaningless objects Hollywood is often criticized for producing.

Even though I sometimes guilt in the pleasure of reading and gossiping about my favorite celebrities I learned a long time ago to separate the art from the persona. It's not always an easy task. Reading this book was akin to reading about a favored actor, author or musician doing or saying something stupid, racist or sexist whether online or in print. I felt gross, betrayed, and uncomfortable. Even though I gave this book four stars for the exceptional symbolism and writing, but I don't think I want to revisit the work again --- or maybe I will after the dust settles. I don’t know. All I know is that The Day of the Locust was a read that confirmed my notions about Hollywood, but also blew out the candle all over again. So love this book I didn’t, but understand its rightful purpose as a necessary fixture of 20th century American fiction I do.

So do I still possess a desire to be an actress? From time to time, I do, but I know better and I know now that I'd rather write truthfully about the spoils of Hollywood like Nathanael West did than to ever come close to being ensnared in its odious sparkle.

from the margins 

• Rating: ****
• 160 pages
• Published May 28th 2015 by New Directions // First published 1939

This review was previously published on March 27, 2017. It was edited for format, spelling, and syntax errors --- because I'm a perfectionist like that.