The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Deplorables

There is a jocular theory that at some time in the remote past the North American continental plates shifted and everything that was loose fell into California. Day of the Locust confirms this hypothesis.

The cast of the novel is a ménage of 1930's drifters and grifters attracted by the movies, or the climate or the chance for a little unconventional action. Mostly they are hapless obsessives who, once there, become lost in either an underworld of vice or some form of otherworldly fundamentalism.

In one way or another, everyone in Los Angeles becomes an actor in order to avoid recognising the scrape they're in. Tod acts like an artist and ends up part of the dereliction he portrays; Faye dreams of being a film star and becomes the leading lady of her own tawdry demise; Homer (apparently the inspiration for the Homer Simpson cartoon) wants desperately to be a settled householder and gets his wish - by adopting a completely submissive role to an ungrateful Faye; a transvestite is so good, he can only manage an unconvincing imitation of a male.

These are the American ancestors of today's Deplorables. Like the crowd that assembles for Hollywood premieres, these people do not fetch up in Hollywood, that worldwide symbol of America, without malice or reason:

"It was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment... 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."

But these people can't seem to find themselves and it irritates them:

They don't know what to do with their time. They haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure... Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment... They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing."

This is the America of Donald Trump: a crusading mob, "a great united front of screwballs and screw-boxes out to purify the land."

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