The Burning of Los Angeles

The first thing that made Nathanael West's The Day of the Locusts stand up and be counted was the inclusion of an oafish character named Homer Simpson in its pages. (Funny that, Groening's genius score drops a tenth of a point -- or should it rise? Hmmm?) But its permanent impression was left on me by the venom West sprayed in every direction of Thirties Hollywood Oasis, which is the novel's subject matter. Old Nate doesn't spare hisself in the process neither, though as the overseer he is much kinder when he's looking in the mirror than when he's observing the lower casts. I can see Hubert Selby injecting a little bit of West in his literary vein a few cycles later, when he started dragging already dirty Brooklynites through the gutters.

Day was one wise Cassandra's recommended read upon my move to Les La LA. Appreciated as another Amerlit pebble in an exponentially growing beach, its sense of entitlement and high air also made me kinda nuts. Whatever assumptions Day made about "people who come to die in California" that still make sense years later -- and don't get me wrong, it gets a lot of star-fucking, bottom-dwelling, blind, blond, illiterate ambition quite right, and I'm gonna steal from it for years to come -- the novel also betrays Left Coast Fitzgerald's hollow, how-high self-esteem. It's like what Fox News always accuses Northeast liberals of being -- without also mentioning that people in the red states are shiningly, happily ignorant -- squeezed into 200 page album of horrid human behavior. Lacking any real empathy but feeling like his prankish honesty with himself is a saving grace (Not!), the narrator/artist seeks to be the documentor of his doomed, scummy mates. His detachment's mirrored in the author's, as though the mansion on the hill is all in the mind, and he doesn't have to interact with the valley-dwellers.

Which it, to some degree, is, and he doesn't, I guess. But I still felt like I was prosecuting myself when reading the book and getting mad at it. I mean ... jeez, just read the tone of this blog [still in development, ed.]. So, maybe, 6 months in, it's re-evaluation time? Continue to skewer the dim bizzers and hipsterati, the Valley residents impervious to their own desperate states, the overachievers who've sold the soul but think it reappears every time the tie is unwound? Or admit that you have joined them, in a state that is different than the one you left. For better or worse, but certainly not til death do us part.