Word: nathanael
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hospital; he wanders the great city of America bumping into "weirdos dressed like Indians or Hunters or Afri can Warriors or Buddhist types who look you in the eye and sing to you." Increasingly, American fiction takes for its raw material things unearthly and bizarre. It is as though Nathanael West's Day of the Locust has been translated from a metaphor for lunacy into a lit mus test of reality...
Raymond Chandler knew the territory well, Nathanael West wrote of it brilliantly in The Day of the Locust, but no one has recently taken the measure of the neon void with such savage precision as Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays was a novel about a young actress, Maria Wyeth, crumbling into the pieces of a psychic jigsaw. Didion drew the Southern California landscape with poisonous accuracy, using its shifting scenes to delineate states of an increasingly troubled mind...
...Banham believes that Los Angeles disproves the equation. To him, the city embodies the reality of the American Dream to combine an urban homestead with suburban good living. Does the city thus seem a bit too eager and guileless, therefore comic? In answer, Banham quotes another Los Angeles observer, Nathanael West: "It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance...
They are all going to go out West, not because they saw Easy Rider, but because of Nathanael West and Charlie Manson and earthquakes and Scott Fitzgerald and St. Mawr and Taco Bell and the beach. After all, if the country isn't there, where...
...When I described my thesis topic to the History and Lit people, I said that there was nothing left but the dead plastic horse at the bottom of the swimming pool. The dead plastic horse comes from Nathanael West, but the History and Lit people didn't like the image. For one thing, it seemed frivolous. And dead and plastic are, after all redundant. Where will you be next Locust...