"She Was Like a Cork. No Matter How Rough the Sea Got, She Would Go Dancing Over the Same Waves That Sank Iron Ships and Tore Away Piers of Reinforced Concrete."

Considering that The Day of the Locust was a relatively short book, there was a whole lot going on. In particular, a lot of colorful, well-detailed characters.

Set in the 1930s, the narrator of the story is Tod, an artist who has recently moved to Hollywood to work on scenic design for the movies, and he tells about the myriad of individuals who pepper his life - Faye Greener, a bombshell aspiring actress, and her father Harry, a former vaudevillian turned door-to-door salesman; Homer Simpson (no relation), a troubled Midwesterner seeking respite in the California sunshine; Abe Kusich, the disgruntled little person with a temper; Earle the realest cowboy in California; Miguel, Earle's Mexican friend. Most of them had come to California with idealized notions of thriving in the movies and becoming a star, but instead live on the fringes of decency, wrapped up in hustles, cock fighting, booze, and prostitution. Oh, did I mention that all of these men are madly in love with Faye and Tod has landed himself in the friend zone but continually has rape fantasies about her? So yeah, there's that. 

At first I really didn't know what to make of the novel. It seemed mostly like a portrait of desperate folks who are trying to make their way through the churning machine of Hollywood, whatever that might look like. And initially, I wasn't all that interested in the characters, but as I moved through the book, I found myself quite engaged with the portraits that said so much about who they were with so few words. There were also a few moments that escalated my opinion - in particular the horrifically detailed cock fight (a literal fight between two roosters), which couldn't have been a clearer analogy for all of the men who eventually come to blows over Faye. And then the culminating scene where Tod, when walking past a movie premiere at the Kahn Persian theatre, quite literally gets swept into the riotous mayhem of the unrelenting crowd. This whole scene was written fancifully, like it was happening as a caricature of real events. But was again, a perfect analogy to describe all of the characters who were swept away in the throes of Hollywood. 

I was surprised to find that I liked the book much more than I thought I would early on. I'm still thinking about it a day later, so that has to say something about it, right? 

I am using this book to fulfill the PopSugar Reading Challenge prompt for "A book about or set in Hollywood."

Next up is a short break from the book lists to read Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. A friend recommended this author and book to me a while back and it has been lurking on my "To Read" list for a while. So I take the plunge. 

178 to go.