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A review by bedcarp
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
3.0
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.