Tod Hackett is a young and talented artist. Hardest game in the world, though, the old young and talented artist game, and it's not really putting food on the table, so Tod has got a job as a trainee set designer with a Hollywood studio. This doesn't exactly provide untold riches either, but at least keeps a roof over his head and allows him to get a sneaky insight into the movie-making process and interact with some assorted Hollywood types.
And a motley bunch they are too: from enraged dwarf Abe Kusich to lanky cowboy impersonator Earle Shoop and his Mexican sidekick (and occasional on-screen Native American impersonator) Miguel, all desperately trying to make it in the film industry but basically all just scrabbling around for a few crumbs dropped from the high table and having to take on trivial and demeaning work just to make ends meet. Most significant from Tod's point of view is Faye Greener, an aspiring actress who lives in the same apartment block as him.
Faye is an attractive young lady of no particular talent who becomes the object of Tod's increasingly violent sexual fantasies. In the real world she has no particular interest in him as a prospective partner; he's too "nice" and not rich enough. Instead she supplements her minimal acting income with some lucrative escort work for the shadowy Mrs. Jenning - a bit of the old whoring, in other words. This doesn't seem to be too much of an imposition for her as she seems quite partial to The Sex, carrying on off-screen with Earle and possibly one or two others. Not Tod, though, and not Homer Simpson (yes, I know, we'll come to that later), the slightly simple accountant whose spacious house Faye talks her way into living in.
A series of increasingly bizarre episodes ensues: Homer and Tod have an encounter with Adore Loomis, the supremely irritating child actor (imagine!) who lives with his pushy mum (imagine!) next door. Miguel organises a cockfight in Homer's garage. There is a wild party at which Faye has sex with Miguel, mainly for the purpose of making Earle jealous, seemingly successfully as a punch-up ensues. Eventually Tod finds himself in a crowd of people who have gathered for a downtown movie premiere. Crowds are fickle things of volatile mood and when Adore Loomis' taunting of Homer Simpson eventually cracks Homer's placid exterior and he gives the boy a savage beating, a riot ensues and Homer is swept away in the crowd. Tod is swept away too but manages to work his way clear of the crowd and is eventually rescued by the police.
The Day Of The Locust was published as long ago as 1939, but feels more modern than that (a sort of reverse True Grit syndrome, if you like). It's a pretty broad satire of Hollywood and the desperate cast of hangers-on who populate its seedy underbelly. Pretty much no-one here is an appealing character - Tod is the nominal hero of the book and seems like a basically decent guy, but the regular fantasies of clubbing Faye over the head with a bottle and raping her suggest there may be something darker going on. It's really more of a series of episodes than a grand sweeping narrative targeted towards making some specific point, and it's hard to know what to make of the ending where Tod is driven away in a police car cackling to himself while the city descends into rioting and chaos. Has he been driven insane? Or has he come to his senses and realised the absurdity of the life he's been living? No doubt the intention was that it could be taken either way.
It's entertaining, and short and snappy at under 200 pages. I'm not sure, for all that, that I'd be including it in any 100 best 20th-century novels list (not that I have any plans to compile one). TIME magazine did, though, so it joins a few others on this list like (among others) Blood Meridian, The French Lieutenant's Woman, On The Road, The Moviegoer and The Bridge Of San Luis Rey. Incidentally the claim in that TIME article that West and his wife were killed in a car crash on their way to the funeral of F Scott Fitzgerald is not corroborated anywhere else as far as I can see. The car crash bit is true, and Fitzgerald had died the day before, but there's no documented connection between the two.
The Homer Simpson connection is an odd one; Matt Groening is on record as claiming that Homer was named after his father, but this article confidently claims a direct link with The Day Of The Locust. It could of course be both.
There was a film of the book made in 1975 with some heavyweight names on board, including Donald Sutherland as Homer Simpson. I expect you could construct a good pub quiz question out of that. It also stars the guy who keeps getting punched by Bruce Willis's wife in the Die Hard films as Tod Hackett.
No comments:
Post a Comment