Word: locust
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Nathanael West habitually wore what he called "the smile of an anarchist . . . with a bomb in his pocket." He also carried the bomb. During the '30s, West flipped two high-explosive satires (Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust) at Middle America. Hardly anybody noticed. His four novels, which took 14 years to write (1924-1938), earned him exactly $1,280 in royalties. Twenty years after his shocking death he was recognized as the finest and blackest American humorist since Mark Twain went to his bitter end. Now, a young California English professor has at last accorded West...
Like West's other books, The Day of the Locust (1939) is essentially a loose society of sketches that enlarge a theme. The World's Illusion is objectified as Hollywood, and Hollywood is personified in Faye Greener, a bitch every man in the book is after. There are no full-fleshed characters, but the book is scaled like a snake with glittering little momentary selves: studio Eskimos, horseparlor dwarfs, rentable Texans and a legion of sad-eyed nobodies who have "come to California to die." Eros is their ethos, violence their pastime. They drift toward a climax...
...radicalized intellectuals, but the middle class reached for alternative ways out. Holywood became their one-dimen-sional Mecca, dance marathons and polesitting were popularized, and newspapers began running columns of advice for lost souls. West's last three novels, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million and The Day of the Locust, use these vaudvillian antics not satirically, but with an eye to the deep pain that necessitated them...
...resisted the contemporary trends to class portrayals and clear ideological perspectives in favor of examining more fundamental spiritual maladies, defined by the banality of everday existence. Tod Hackett of The Day of the Locust, recently graduated from Yale, is no less caught up in the Hollywood dream factory than his pan-handler and pimp friends. West grew to condemn not Americans but American ways and manners, evident in the leathery rationalizations of business leaders, as well as the radical polities of many of his friends...
Regardless, Martin's biography has done much to stimulate a revival of interest in West. It would be difficult to place him as a major artist of the first half of the twentieth century, but his contribution to literature is significant. Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, probably his best novels, are both short, compressed and episodic, anticipating forms only now being elaborated by Brautigan and Barthelme. West's use of artifacts from mass culture and delicate caricatures during a time concerned with the purity of literature evidences his versatile and original talent. However, he made very little...