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3.37 AVERAGE
3.37 AVERAGE
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The story is nonlinear and episodic; as with all novels with an episodic structure, some episodes are more interesting than others, but none of these are complete duds.
Some parts of this made me cringe. The sex in this book is ugly and laced with tension. There is also black humor aplenty here, but it is so dry that you might slip through your fingers.
The ending isn't so much a climax as it is a culmination of all the ugliness we've endured since the beginning of the novel. The violent final chapter is equally surprising and inevitable.
Some parts of this made me cringe. The sex in this book is ugly and laced with tension. There is also black humor aplenty here, but it is so dry that you might slip through your fingers.
The ending isn't so much a climax as it is a culmination of all the ugliness we've endured since the beginning of the novel. The violent final chapter is equally surprising and inevitable.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Sexual assault
”[H]e was using the innumerable sketches he had made of the people who come to California to die (…) all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence” (182).
This novel was exactly what I hoped it would be: a story that captures the glittery-but-dangerous atmosphere of California (and specifically Los Angeles) exactly. I plan on re-reading this just to see how Nathanael West managed to convey such a specific mood without extensive scene-setting. For a novella like this one, it is almost over-populated with characters, and yet it seems those are precisely what create the mood of the story. I’ve never really read anything like it, and I am very intrigued.
From the very beginning, there is something in the air here. You know that sense that something is truly off, but you can’t pinpoint what it is?
That’s the feeling that pervades this novel.
There is very little plot here, but somehow it’s never dull — I’m guessing because of the sense of foreboding that permeates everything.
Tod has moved to Los Angeles to work as a Hollywood set designer, and in his spare time he works on his painting “The Burning of Los Angeles.” More often, though, he hangs around Faye, a girl who lives in the same building he does, and spends time with her and the various other guys who obsess over her.
The most significant of all of these is a man called Homer Simpson (!), who is excessively nice and self-effacing.
This being Hollywood, Faye and the men surrounding her are an odd collection of people. They could have been caricatures if West had not drawn them so carefully, and made them so believable — halfway between real person and pretence.
As the story unfolds, everyone seems to become more impatient, more restless, less kind, which can only mean one thing: none of this can end well.
I’m truly fascinated by the way in which West wrote this story — with so little plot and such lively characters, and with such precisely chosen details that they evoke an entire scene in just a few sentences:
“It was one of those blue and lavender nights when the luminous color seems to have been blown over the scene with an airbrush. Even the darkest shadows held some purple” (131).
I loved it, and will definitely read it again.
This novel was exactly what I hoped it would be: a story that captures the glittery-but-dangerous atmosphere of California (and specifically Los Angeles) exactly. I plan on re-reading this just to see how Nathanael West managed to convey such a specific mood without extensive scene-setting. For a novella like this one, it is almost over-populated with characters, and yet it seems those are precisely what create the mood of the story. I’ve never really read anything like it, and I am very intrigued.
From the very beginning, there is something in the air here. You know that sense that something is truly off, but you can’t pinpoint what it is?
That’s the feeling that pervades this novel.
There is very little plot here, but somehow it’s never dull — I’m guessing because of the sense of foreboding that permeates everything.
Tod has moved to Los Angeles to work as a Hollywood set designer, and in his spare time he works on his painting “The Burning of Los Angeles.” More often, though, he hangs around Faye, a girl who lives in the same building he does, and spends time with her and the various other guys who obsess over her.
The most significant of all of these is a man called Homer Simpson (!), who is excessively nice and self-effacing.
This being Hollywood, Faye and the men surrounding her are an odd collection of people. They could have been caricatures if West had not drawn them so carefully, and made them so believable — halfway between real person and pretence.
As the story unfolds, everyone seems to become more impatient, more restless, less kind, which can only mean one thing: none of this can end well.
I’m truly fascinated by the way in which West wrote this story — with so little plot and such lively characters, and with such precisely chosen details that they evoke an entire scene in just a few sentences:
“It was one of those blue and lavender nights when the luminous color seems to have been blown over the scene with an airbrush. Even the darkest shadows held some purple” (131).
I loved it, and will definitely read it again.
A strange and often genuinely terrifying book. I'm even tempted to call it 'nutso.' You can see a real influence here on the works of Flannery O'Connor, David Lynch, and the Coen Brothers. (It's the bellowing belligerent dwarf that ties them all together.) Also works as a grotesque counterpart to [b:The Grapes Of Wrath|4395|The Grapes of Wrath|John Steinbeck|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309212810s/4395.jpg|2931549].
west is almost too good of a satirist - from the opening pages the erudite reader is made aware that his vision of hollywood is being narrated with an endlessly skeptical and cynical eye, one which never lets up its ruthless disparaging of the whirlwinds of facade that occupy the novel. its brilliance, perhaps, lies in the deliberate extinguishing of any kind of respite from a hollywood plagued by artifice and pretension, written in rich prose at once impassioned and defeated, the decrying of falseness without any necessity to reaffirm an underlying truth.
the day of the locust, for its entirety, is buoyed along by a persistently garish and stylistically excellent depiction of a surreal, technicolor-tinted fever dream, a lurid landscape where dreams cannot be shot down because they have never even bothered to maintain the impression of any tethering to reality. west narrates his novel with a truly cinematic flourish that befits his world, one of the few times where the affectation 'lynchian' is truly earned. stage four: the sign bears no relation to any reality whatsoever, it is its own pure simulacrum.
the day of the locust, for its entirety, is buoyed along by a persistently garish and stylistically excellent depiction of a surreal, technicolor-tinted fever dream, a lurid landscape where dreams cannot be shot down because they have never even bothered to maintain the impression of any tethering to reality. west narrates his novel with a truly cinematic flourish that befits his world, one of the few times where the affectation 'lynchian' is truly earned. stage four: the sign bears no relation to any reality whatsoever, it is its own pure simulacrum.
Apparently I'm just not a fan of Nathanael West. I didn't care for any of the characters. They were flat and had ugly personalities and lacked virtue. The subject matter and plot of the story were mundane: I was unable to care. The story arc was largely anticlimactic and uninteresting. The point of the story was trivial and unimportant to me.
Hollywood's quintessential novel, and arguably, America's novel. West captures the loony calamity of the movie industry, while drawing parallels to the entire country. Tod Hackett is a painter working on his final project, "The Burning of L.A.," when he falls in love with the fake, selfish, Daisy Buchanon-like star-to-be, Faye Greener. The diversity of characters gives this book its shape: the self-depravity of Homer, the drunkenness and poverty of Earle, the temper of Abe---all of whom are star-struck by the beautiful and hollow Faye. From cockfights to funerals to violent mobs, The Day of the Locust slowly devolves into the madness and hysteria of a culture that has lost the promised American Dream.
medium-paced
Since I was a teenager I have salt & peppered my reading with a number of the Great American Classics...nearly all of the Hemingway's, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc...Edgar Allen Poe...of the more modern authors many John Updike, Jack Kerouac, even Joyce Carrol Oates and a few others along the way....it's fun, interesting reading. Sooooooooo...The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West, an American Classic about Hollywood in 1939, has been on my reading list for a long, long time. I picked up a copy at the library the other day...gave it a read...and...and IT SUCKED! Horrible...one of the biggest let downs of my reading experience. It's NOT about he glory days of Hollywood, the cinema capitol of the world...it's about a couple of country bumpkins who end up in Hollywood with no plans other than make it Big and their trials & tribulations...So what! Who the flip cares? Not one redeeming character...one who's name is Homer Simpson! Doh! Yeah...I thought it was a real stinker...so glad I got a loaner and didn't pay for this crap...not much else to say...suck-o...1 outta 5...