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In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl by Rachel Trezise (2000)

June 7, 2010 Book Reviews
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In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl by Rachel Trezise (2002)I take extensive notes while I am reading, sometimes in my reading notebook, or an index card that doubles as a bookmark; notes on characters, story, quotes, ideas, words I want to look up. This is my routine, this is how I read. However, when reading Rachel Trezise‘s In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl recently, I didn’t take any notes. I read it in one sitting, and I couldn’t even bear to put the book down long enough to take a note of the page numbers I wanted to return to, instead I resorted to dog-earring the pages with passages I fell in love with – anything to avoid interrupting the luscious flow of Trezise’s powerful and lyrical prose.

Hendrefadog is a village with a population of five thousand. It seems since Dare pit closed unknown years before I was born there, unemployment had become a fashion which takes too long to die out. Like ski pants, and tennis shirts, clothes which are made popular by fashionable sports, but continue to be worn when sport has become unpopular, worn by middle-aged women who have never been skiing, or given as hand-me-downs to children who have never watched a game of tennis. Like middle-class families who refuse to smash tradition and all become doctors one after the other, Hendrefadog teenagers followed their parents to the dole queue, making us a notch lower than working-class. My generation, the products of unemployed parents, of divorce and downright poverty, tried desperately to find satisfaction in joyriding and class B drugs (which were barely affordable), cider-drinking in lanes, and underage sex.

Rebecca Trigianni is growing up in Wales, she idealizes her glamourous, alcoholic mother and is brutally raped by her step-father at the age of eleven. She is mostly neglected by her mother, and runs away with an older boyfriend at the age of fourteen immersing herself in a life of excesses and danger, until she is dragged back home and returns to school. She falls in love, takes a lot of drugs, gets her heart broken. She sees her rapist walk free. She becomes involved with an emotionally abusive boyfriend, and once that relationship ends Rebecca moves back in with her mother and her new boyfriend. It is only when caring for her dying grandmother that Rebecca realizes that despite everything that has happened to her, she still has her strength and determination, and that will enable her to survive.

Her story is powerful because it is told in her own voice, with all the impassioned urgency and emotional turmoil that involves. In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl isn’t so much about the story, although obviously that plays a huge part in how Rebecca sees the world and herself, but it is Trezise’s ability to convey the feelings of helplessness, loss and strength in Rebecca’s voice. Finally, a literary voice that echoes the sometimes manic energy of my own inner voice, the less than ideal surroundings and circumstance, the unromantic and honest portrayal of pain and heartbreak as utterly devastating. The description of the cultural and social landscape of the working class Welsh valley towns echo my own experience and feelings about where I grew up and live, the regular predictability, the helplessness and the need and the struggle to escape it, the trappings such an environment sets for its inhabitants. And all of this captured in brutal and lively writing.

I began to look at the place of my birth, growth and youth with double vision, one which looked down from above and saw through everyone and everything because I knew I could be bigger; and another vision at eye level which accepted these common, common people because I was afraid it was all I would ever be.
I always felt kind of like Alan Bennett, worrying whether I should be speaking properly or being myself, knowing too well that the difference between metropolitcan and provincial still exists. As his mother’s chance meeting with T.S. Eliot made him conscious of his working-class upbringing, my short visists to Nottingham city and Birmingham Bullring would perpetually remind me what a handicap it could be to grow up in a place like the Rhondda.
Before you had time to worry about what outsiders would think of your accent or your Welsh mannerisms, or your memories of quaint houses stuck together with walls so thin you could hear your neighbours having boring Rhondda missionary-position sex, you would have to worry about what your neighbours thought of you trying to get away from it.
I wanted so desperately to shatter the dreams of hometown people who only find respect for you if you give up the fight for originality. But if you stand out like a sore thumb, looking like you’re doing better than the next one, then someone will knock you down. How can you be the one to make the change in a place where nothing ever changes but the shoes?

The blunt pursuit of emotional honesty to herself and her readers, if not always for those in her life, makes Rebecca’s confessional voice one of the most convincing I’ve read in literature in a while, a deafening scream that refuses to go unheard. If my ramblings about In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl seem a little more fragmented than usual, I’m going to blame the lack of coherent notes. After reading Sixteen Shades of Crazy I thought I would just be keeping a casual eye out for more of Rachel Trezise’s work, but In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl has made me a Trezise devotee.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe (1958)

June 2, 2010 Book Reviews
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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe (1958)Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a look at the shackles and minor freedoms of 1950s English working class men, seen through the eyes of a ballsy Arthur Seaton who works all week in a factory job and spends his weekends dressed up, drinking to excess, getting into the occasional fight and hopping into the beds of married woman. With a strong focus on his rage against the Establishment and domestic life, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning has a strongly masculine voice but ultimately the sadness, hopelessness and futility of his revolt has wide appeal.

For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on a Saturday night, and the effect of a week’s monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of ‘be drunk and be happy’, kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.

Arthur Seaton is young, cocksure and fond of a strong drink and married women. He’s all attitude: it seems to be an insolent youthfulness in him, the feeling that nothing can touch him, he knows everything, he’s got everyone all figured out. He works a repetitive factory job, spends his weekend boozing and the rest of his free time bedding a married woman, Brenda. Arthur is surprisingly friendly with Brenda’s husband, Jack, who he works with – he sometimes worries about being found out, but at the same time is pretty certain he won’t be, or that if he is it won’t be his problem. When Brenda tells Arthur that she is pregnant with his child, Arthur’s encourages her to “take care of it.” Arthur’s attitude toward women is outdated, slightly misogynist and youthfully ignorant. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the great risks Brenda takes in order to be with him. For him it’s a lark, for Brenda it endangers everything she holds as stable.

On the evening Brenda terminates her pregnancy, Arthur sleeps with Brenda’s sister – the also married Winnie. Only Winnie’s husband isn’t as clueless as Jack, and he sets out to find Arthur and make him pay. Arthur continues his dalliances, as well as romancing a somewhat naïve girl named Doreen, until he is beaten up by two soldiers on account of his reckless affairs. After this happens, there is a more pronounced level of dissatisfaction with the world around him, with the government, the army, the work force, as he realizes he is impotent to fight against it and he too is drawn into the endless of cycle of marriage, procreation, work and boozy weekends. Perhaps his relationships with married women was a method of avoiding the responsibility of marriage, an inevitability that his relationship with Doreen seems headed toward.

He was nothing at all when people tried to tell him what he was. Not even his own name was enough, though it might be on his pay-book. What am I? he wondered. A six-foot pit-prop that wants a pint of ale. That’s what I am. And if any knowing bastard says that that’s what I am, I’m a dynamite-dealer, Stengun seller, hundred-ton tank trader, a capstan lathe operator waiting to blow the army to Kingdom Cum. I’m me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me.

Arthur’s family and home life are written with such an inviting warmth, which contrasts sharply to Arthur’s booze-fuelled weekends and shunning of domestic life. Sillietoe makes it difficult to see what exactly Arthur is so afraid of this domesticity. Arthur’s is a particularly masculine rage and disaffection that is eventually made futile by his inability to escape the routine of familial life. His only escape, such that it is, is through booze and random acts of violence – although these seem to be more of a stunted expression of his anger and disaffection than an escape from it. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning effectively captures how banal comments can escalate into brawls, how violence is always – in Arthur’s circumstances – just a brief comment or misguided look away; and how much of a role alcohol plays in such situations. Like the drunk that smashes the store window and attempts to run away only as the police arrive, Arthur too is resigned to his fate, to what he cannot fight or avoid any longer despite his staunch self-belief and anti-authoritarian attitude. There is something resoundingly sad in his resignation, his willingness to give up those beliefs he held on to so strongly so easily, out of necessity, the social world practically demands it of him.

Sixteen Shades of Crazy by Rachel Trezise (2010)

May 31, 2010 Book Reviews
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Sixteen Shades of Crazy by Rachel Trezise (2010)Rachel Trezise’s Sixteen Shades of Crazy is set in a small Welsh valley village, Aberalaw, where three very different women find themselves attracted to an English drugdealer. The three women, Ellie, Siân and Rhiannon, are the girlfriends of a local punk band, the Boobs and after an eighteen month narcotic drought, Johnny provides not only chemicals for the women but intrigue, mystery and the chance of escape.

Ellie is the most sympathetic of the three, she’s educated, sensitive and has resigned herself to dull factory work after her dream of coasting on the wave of what she thought would be the Boobs inevitable successes seems less and less likely. She’s intelligent, aware of the limitations of her surroundings and her self, and how there is an irreperable difference between those around her and what she desires for herself. Her boyfriend, Andy, is intent on planning their upcoming nuptials according to his family traditions, but Ellie is hesitant, realizing that expressing a reluctance to marry and procreate would be akin to blasphemy in the eyes of her friends and his family. For her Johnny is alluring because he seems to offer a escape from the banal future, he engages with her on issues that she is passionate about. Her sights are set beyond Aberalaw, a fact the others – content with the rituals of their insular village life – appear to resent. It is frustrating, at the beginning, that Ellie seems to think her only escape is through Andy’s band, when clearly he doesn’t want to escape the familial tradition and domestic simplicity. Her relationship with Johnny is based on false hopes based on Johnny’s knowledge built on soundbites – he knows enough to get these women interested enough to sleep with him, but there is no need for him to know anything beyond that because once that’s done, well, he really has no need for them.

She never overlooked an opportunity to remind Ellie where she was, because she knew Ellie wanted to be elsewhere, beneath the skyscrapers of New York. Rhiannon had resigned herself to a monotonous existence inthe Welsh gutter and no one else was allowed to look up at the stars.

Siân, as a main character, is unfairly underused; she comes across as merely a supporting player for the endless conflict between Ellie and Rhiannon but her story is just as heartbreaking as theirs. Siân is the image of familial perfection, she has the happy children and the tidy home, but with a clueless husband and working two jobs, a deeper malaise lies beneath her life. Siân’s inner life isn’t as explored as Ellie or Rhiannon’s, but her attraction to Johnny is mainly for his product. He can provide the pills she desires to blunt the motherly instinct she cannot otherwise escape. Her ending is tragic, set in motion by the cruel trickery of Rhiannon.

Rhiannon, nearing forty, is grotesque in her excess: physically, her large body is made comedic by oversized silicon breasts, her attitude, her blunt, rude and abrasive way of speaking, her unsubtle cruelty to others. Sex is her weapon, as attack and defence. Her contempt for beauty (Siân) or intelligence (Ellie) isn’t so much borne of jealousy, she just can’t see their use when her flesh is all she needs to seduce, to get her own way. Rhiannon is pure viciousness, made more disturbing by outbursts of violence that demand she is the focus of all attention. Her attraction to Johnny is one of conquest, having what the others want, and having it before them. It is Rhiannon that ends up with Johnny post-drug bust, but the others have moved on – Ellie to New York, Siân in death – and I wonder whether her supposed victory is soured by the lack of willing competition. There are some brief comments on Rhiannon’s mixed heritage – her father was black, her mother white – but other than inspiring a number of distasteful remarks from minor characters, this doesn’t seem to really go anywhere, I’m uncertain how her race matters here.

The women in Sixteen Shades of Crazy are all desperate, and only a stranger can offer them the opportunity to evolve. The constant tension of casual violence and endless boredom of the working class village remains somewhat in the background, I would have loved more reflection into how the surroundings and culture worked to trap these three women in the first place. However, Sixteen Shades of Crazy is primarily a character driven novel and Trezise creates a rich interior life for these suffocated women – especially with Ellie and Rhiannon – that makes their plights difficult to ignore.

Book Loot: Week Ending May 30th, 2010

May 30, 2010 Book Loot
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The last of my Fitzgerald’s are filtering through and my, my they do look lovely all together! The photographs on the covers are a little bit kitsch, I’ll take a photo of them when they’ve all arrived.

This week’s loot links, other than this thorough feminist reading list, are all videos:

  • Dale Campisi from Arcade Publications talks about E.W. Cole (you can read my review of the book he’s discussing, Lisa Lang’s E.W. Cole: Chasing the Rainbow here) and what independent booksellers can learn from Cole’s approach to bookselling. I might use this video to convince my boss that our book store really needs a monkey enclosure.
  • Are you ready for the self-referential joy that is this youtube video? Here is Andrew McCarthy reviewing Bret Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms. “What? What do I care what Blane from Pretty in Pink cares about a book?!” There was a film version of Less Than Zero and Andrew McCarthy played the lead character, Clay. Imperial Bedrooms is a sequel to the original novel Less Than Zero, which opens with a discussion of the film version of their lives from the perspective of Clay, AND Andrew McCarthy is the narrator of the Imperial Bedrooms audiobook. This might just be a cleverly self-aware, effective bit of marketing hype, but I kind of love it.
  • And finally, the dulcet tones of Damon Albarn reading Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark (1971)

May 26, 2010 Book Reviews
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Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark (1971)I fear that I read Muriel Spark’s Not to Disturb too soon after having been enthralled and confused by The Driver’s Seat. The two novels deal with such similar themes and the same sense of eerie prediction of death, but Not to Disturb had much less of an impact. As a storm brews around a mansion, the servants prepare for a tragedy. The intimation of death is much like that of The Driver’s Seat, but rather than an atmosphere of threat and foreboding, the story here drags and the mystery is largely irrelevant.

‘They are still alive,’ says Lister. ‘I’m sure of that. It hasn’t happened yet.’
‘It’s going to happen,’ she says.
‘Oh my dear, it’s inevitable.’

Not to Disturb focuses on the servants of a Baron and Baroness, and “him in the attic”, a mentally deranged man kept in the attic with a nurse. The Baron and Baroness are meeting with their secretary Victor in the library, and the head butler has been told that under no circumstances is he to disturb them. The servants are preparing themselves for the imminent death of someone in the library and the onslaught of journalists and outsiders that are sure to follow afterward. They’ve all written their memoirs, they practice their interview responses, they work on getting their stories straight. However, it is never clear exactly how they know what is to happen during the night. Could it be that the house and the lives of the Baron and Baroness run so smoothly thanks to the endless toil of the servants, and the servants are so attuned to the behaviour and lives of their masters that they can see the murder/suicide coming? Is it merely a well-informed prediction? It’s never quite revealed.

‘Locked’ says Lister, turning away, ‘and silent. Let’s proceed,’ he says, leading the way to the servants quarters. ‘There remain a good many things to be accomplished and still more chaos effectively to organize.’

Much of the story looks at the rampant opportunism of the servants. Not only do they look to cash in on the aftermath of the deaths, but they organize a slapdash marraige between the pregnant parlour maid Heloise and “him in the attic”, the Baron’s relative Gustav, heir to the family fortune. After this admittedly comedic farce it seems possible that the servants orchestrated the murder in order to get their hands on the inheritance, as well as profit from their media deals. None of these questions are really answered, but not much is offered in the way of coming up with our own answers to this. Overall, I was unimpressed with Not to Disturb, but I wonder how much of that comes from having read it so soon after The Driver’s Seat.

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark (1970)

May 24, 2010 Book Reviews
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The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark (1970)Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat is a short and savage character study of a woman gradually losing control of herself. Lise has worked in the same dull office job for sixteen years, and finally, she is going on holiday. However, this isn’t an idyllic retreat from the humdrum existence of her everyday life -  we soon discover that Lise will be found brutally murdered by the end of the first day of her vacation.

The Driver’s Seat opens on an exchange in a store dressing room over the stain-resistant fabric of a dress. The encounter is told in an almost cyclical way, first as it happens, shifting back to what happened just before and then the original exchange is retold, with slightly different details. This technique is used often throughout the novel, a comment on perception, on the effect time has on memory – something that will become crucial and more pronounced as Lise’s steps are retraced by witnesses in the wake of her murder. As she prepares to leave for her trip she begins to gleefully lie to strangers, creating elaborate false identities and personas during her encounters. It becomes apparent through Lise’s interactions with her co-workers, shop staff and strangers that there may be something not quite right about Lise’s behaviour, whether it is the product of mental illness or just eccentricity remains to be seen.

Once the reader is informed that Lise will be found stabbed to death, everything is shadowed by a vague sense of threat, everything, even innocuous remarks, seems potentially dangerous and threatening. A man frightened by Lise’s appearance moves away from her on the airplane. A macrobiotic diet fanatic engages her in conversation and invites her to meet up with him later. Lise hides her passport in a taxi. As she wanders around the unnamed city with the elderly Mrs Fiedke, she is on the lookout for a man but she doesn’t seem to know who or where she will find him.

‘Will you feel a presence? Is that how you’ll know?’
‘Not really a presence,’ Lise says. ‘The lack of an absence, that’s what it is. I know I’ll find it. I keep making mistakes though.’

Most prominently, Lise shops endlessly. On her holiday, with our knowledge of her imminent death, the objects she buys and accumulates seem to hold great importance. It soon becomes apparent that Lise has plotted her own murder, as though her death is something as easily purchased as a lipstick, a scarf, or a silk tie. If consumer culture allows us to buy into an idea of a certain life or ideal, then surely it can also provide the ideal death? The murder scene, and the calculated approach that Lise takes to engage her murderer, is disturbing – all the threatening atmosphere and people seem harmless in comparison when Lise is the most dangerous to herself.

Ultimately, this scenario raises many more questions than it answers: why does Lise make herself so willingly visible, her clothes, her demeanour, her interactions with others, when this was her plan all along? To ensure witnesses? To ensure that someone, somewhere remembers her? To be certain that some form of story, however untrue, can be gleamed from the witness statements? The Driver’s Seat is genuinely confounding.

Book Loot: Week Ending May 23rd, 2010

May 23, 2010 Book Loot
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Ernest Hemingway poses with a water buffalo while on safari in Africa, 1953-1954Well, it appears after last week’s overload of links the internet has dried up this week. It’s good, in a way, as I seem to have been a lot more productive this week. Thanks boring internet, but please don’t always be this way. Oh look! Here’s Ernest Hemingway with a buffalo!

Photo credit: Ernest Hemingway poses with a water buffalo while on safari in Africa, 1953-1954. Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston.

http://thenewinquiry.com/post/589628505/lester-bangs-and-rock-music-as-the-eternal-high-school

Columbine by Dave Cullen (2009)

May 17, 2010 Book Reviews
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Columbine by Dave Cullen (2009)Chances are you remember the footage. The two figures clutching guns stalking the abandoned school cafeteria, the frightened students outside. More likely you remember how Columbine came to mean so much more than just a high school massacre, it incited debate about gun legislation and the availability of weapons, bullying, subcultures, violent movies, music, parental responsibility, school security, antidepressants, religion. In his astoundingly powerful Columbine Dave Cullen painstakingly reconstructs April 20th, 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold stormed their high school and killed 12 students, 1 teacher, and injured over twenty others before committing suicide; Cullen also looks at the aftermath of the massacre, and questions everything we think we know and believe about Columbine.

Cullen opens his report with coverage of the weekend leading up to the massacre. He outlines the things Eric and Dylan did that weekend – not so much the meticulous and obsessive planning and preparation – but the everyday, teenage routines. Dylan went to prom, Eric received a promotion at the pizza joint they worked at, their interests, activities, personalities, emotions, their strengths and weaknesses, their family and active social lives. Cullen creates portraits of these boys which, disturbing as it may be to some, humanizes them. Rather than using the tired “monster” image, Cullen looks at them as humans. This, I think, is effective in raising questions about motivations and reasoning. Despite their heinous crimes, dismissing their actions as those of monsters or evil is just a way of avoiding confrontation and fear that two average, suburban teenage boys did this. It shifts responsibility away from them as individuals and on to society, culture, whatever – which doubtlessly played a role, but it takes a lot of strength to look into the darker parts of the human psyche to try and see what really caused them to kill.

We remember Columbine as a pair of outcasts Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-standing feud. Almost none of that happened. No Goths, no outcasts, nobody snapping. No targets, no feud, and no Trench Coat Mafia. Most of these elements existed at Columbine – which is what gave them such currency. They just had nothing to do with the murders. The lesser myths are equally unsupported: no connection to Marilyn Manson, Hitler’s birthday, minorities or Christians.
Few people knowledgeable about the case believe those myths anymore. Not reporters, investigators, families of the victims, or their legal teams. And yet most of the public takes them for granted. Why?

It is somewhat confronting to realize how deeply the myths about Columbine – the supposed outcast and bullied victim status of Dylan and Eric, the trenchcoats, etc.- run, primarily thanks to saturated media coverage. Cullen never resorts to conspiratorial theories about why the media so openly propagated these myths, and instead offers a sound reasoning as to how and why these stories took hold. He is careful to never lay blame on the victims or the witnesses, but is unrepetent on the media which used the testimonies of unreliable witnesses – being that their horribly traumatic experiences – without question. Of course the brain and memory functions differently in such high-stress situations, and yet the media took these accounts, even off the cuff remarks as absolute truths. His ruthless attitude toward the abused responsibility and power of the media seems to be, at least in part, a redemptive act – making up for mistakes he may have made in his original reporting on the situation. It’s interesting to consider the delay in the relay of information – local papers would print information one day and it would filter out to more national outlets the following day – and how today’s faster dissemination of information and news could leave it prone to further mistakes. Even the martyrdom of Cassie Bernall (who it was originally claimed was asked if she believed in God by Eric, she said yes and he shot her. This has since been disproved – although another student did have this exchange with Eric, she survived.) survives due to the infiltration of false information. Here however, it was used – effectively – by the religious sector to further their own cause, as though we were so desperate for a symbol of hope in amongst all the horror than even one based on misinformation would do. Nonetheless, Cullen provides a powerful symbol of hope in the figure of Patrick Ireland, shot multiple times and escaped from the school via the library window, Cullen takes us through Ireland’s painful recovery process and forgiveness, through to Patrick overcoming his physical ailments and dancing at his wedding.

The uncovering of Eric and Dylan’s previous arrests, search warrants, threats of violence, violent stories seems to have been strangely covered up, Cullen discusses these criminal histories not so much to shift the blame or to show where the Columbine attack could have been prevented, but who these boys were, what happened in the lead up to April 20. An FBI investigator deems that Eric was a psychopath – he used violence for pure enjoyment and to demonstrate his superiority; Dylan was a depressive who was willingly roped into Eric’s plans. This distinct lack of motive is what drives the curiousity and continuing search for answers, and perhaps is the most frightening aspect of the whole saga: it seems we cannot accept that there may never have been a logical reason behind their acts, so we keep looking for scapegoats, easy answers, for someone or something to blame.

Dave Cullen so effectively erases his own authorial voice that it is very easy to accept everything he writes as the definitive version of the massacre, and yet so much remains unanswered and contradictory. I still feel like it is important to note that despite his indepth research, conjecture and consultation with experts on the case, it is still only one journalists interpretation of events. The only two people who could ever answer the many questions their actions raised died that afternoon in the library, but Cullen does an stellar job of debunking the myths and tracing the boys’ evolution from high school kids to mass murderers. The book trailer on youtube features Dave Cullen speaking about the book and makes me want to read Columbine again. This story will get inside your head, it’s intense, frightening and confronting but absolutely necessary.

Book Loot: Week Ending 16th May, 2010

May 16, 2010 Book Loot
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Natalie WoodJust one this week, from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program thanks to Hesperus Press:

Was it just me, or was there an overwhelming amount of good articles to be found on the interwebs this week?

I collect shocking titles — “Sex on Horseback,’’ “Roughneck River,’’ “Convict Lust,’’ “Stars and Their Pets.’’ My most shocking books I put in the guest room, so people don’t stay real long.

Photo Credit: Natalie Wood, from the Women Reading tumblr.

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)

May 14, 2010 Book Reviews
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The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)After the experience of reading Nathanael West‘s previous three novels, I went into The Day of the Locust anticipating the awful things he would put his characters through; however, in The Day of the Locust West carefully and slowly reveals the sordid nature of his somewhat archetypal characters. It is an undeniably Los Angeles novel, with a cast of characters featuring set designers, producers, actresses, stage mothers and a gambling midget, but shatters the illusion of a glittering, glamourous Hollywood.

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the monstrous.

Tod Hackett has been in Hollywood for three months to work in set and costume design for the movies. He dreams of becoming a “serious” painter, and even as he is drawn into the world of his commercial art, he still finds inspiration in the landscapes and people of California. It’s a place that is defined by an eclectic mix of styles – of clothing, of architecture – that seem to be always out of place, never quite right for the environment and it comes across as almost grotesque. Tod is presented, at first, as the typical everyman character – a little bland, but not unlikable – but his visions, behaviour and thoughts take a disturbing and unsettling turn as the woman he desires, struggling actress Faye Greener, becomes more involved with another man, Homer Simpson. His behaviour seems to be solely driven by his need to get as close as he can to Faye, including taking care of her ailing vaudevillian father Harry, and going along with her on her dates with other men.

Harry groaned again, modulating from pain to exhaustion, then closed his eyes. Tod saw how skilfully he got the maximum effect out of his agonized profile by using the pillow to set it off. He also noticed that Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he could never express anything either subtly or exactly. They wouldn’t permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree.

Homer Simpson is equally strange – Tod catches him outside their apartment building one evening staring up at Faye’s window and he has a mechanical, detached way of living. His relationship with Faye, especially after the death of her father, is categorized by the two of them as a convenient business arrangement. In other words, Homer has money and Faye thinks she needs money in order to become a star. Their relationship gradually deteriorates, they act out before the relationship is actually ended, Faye becomes more malicious, Homer tries to make things up by being more generous. Faye disappears after a fight between a number of men over her, and Homer and Tod are left to fight for themselves in a brutal crush at a movie premiere.

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?
Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. 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. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

It really is a strange little novel, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. Obviously it’s a comment on the illusions offered by entertainment, but also by our own desires and needs, and how badly we react when we realize these illusions are false. The transformation of the characters is extreme, seemingly motivated by the invisible dark force of disillusionment. They’ve all come to Hollywood to find something, someone, achieve a dream, only to find their search fruitless and their dreams destroyed. Faye turns from the coquettish ingenue to master manipulator of men. Tod changes from a dreamy artist to a man who vividly fantasizes about raping Faye. Homer, too, changes from a quiet, meek man to being capable of committing an unforgettable act of violence in the final riot. Deeply unsettling.

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