The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West's Hollywood novel takes place mostly at the margins of the movie kingdom, the universe of set painters and extras, frustrated small-timers, hangers-on and oddities. There are prostitutes here, transplanted Eskimos, a failed comic who sells silver polish door to door so that he can force luckless customers to watch his act. No one in this book has found the promise that California was supposed to offer, and at the end their anger and resentments collect into a riot in the streets that is the sum of their individual discontents. "They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment.... The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies." This was West's last novel. He died the following year in a car accident, at age 37, rushing to the funeral of F. Scott Fitzgerald. How he would have loved that last grotesque detail.