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A review by lavender_matter
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
2.0
My wife recommended this book to me because we used to live in LA and this book is a testament to how fake it is.
Taking place during the Great Depression, the main character (an art graduate from Yale) tries to make it big in Hollywood after being hired as a set painter. He soon discovers that the dream of Hollywood is completely fabricated as an escape from the capitalist hell that he and the rest of the characters endure. The prose is not particularly compelling, but with some of the graphic things that happen in the book you can see how dead inside the characters are. They are tired, jaded and broke after being promised the world. That’s Hollywood for ya, and it’s gotten even more like this almost 85 years after this book was written.
A short enough read, I can appreciate the cultural relevance of the book but be warned that it slogs on and on.
Taking place during the Great Depression, the main character (an art graduate from Yale) tries to make it big in Hollywood after being hired as a set painter. He soon discovers that the dream of Hollywood is completely fabricated as an escape from the capitalist hell that he and the rest of the characters endure. The prose is not particularly compelling, but with some of the graphic things that happen in the book you can see how dead inside the characters are. They are tired, jaded and broke after being promised the world. That’s Hollywood for ya, and it’s gotten even more like this almost 85 years after this book was written.
A short enough read, I can appreciate the cultural relevance of the book but be warned that it slogs on and on.