There are those who believe Los Angeles is a city where dreams come to die. They run out of space as the continent butts against the Pacific. There is nowhere else to go. It is a town where the endgame of manifest destiny and the promise of fame are relentlessly beaten back by the waves, rereleased onto the boulevards, and channeled into desperation, mania, or violence. The promise of leisure, fame, and paradise, such a logic tells us, sure can be deceiving.
If this is your school of thinking—I’m partially on board—then you’ll find an oracular reflection in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, a book tragically more relevant now, perhaps, than when it was first published in 1939.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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Here are the basics: Tod Hackett, a graduate of what is today called the Yale School of Art, finds himself working as a set painter on the lot of a Hollywood studio, where he watches the pantomime world pass by his window—battalions and squadrons of actors costumed for celluloid warfare. Transfixed and disillusioned by the spectacle, Hackett plans an epic painting called “The Burning of Los Angeles,” a complex and deranged work in which the city is torched by a mob spurred on by the soporific doldrums of the American dream. These are people for whom “the sun is a joke”; “oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates.” At the front of this mob are Hackett’s neighbors and acquaintances, thrilling to the violence even as they try to outrun it—wannabe starlets, simpletons, con artists, vaudevillians, all unable to distinguish between the roles they play and their actual lives.
Maybe this last affliction sounds familiar? If not, just tune into Bravo or the live feed of any Instagram influencer.
Some critics have written off West’s collection of dime-store cowboys, Mexican cockfighters, wellness-cult cuckooberries, and Hollywood whores as grotesques and caricatures, while dismissing his story as screwball. Truth is, West was nothing short of a prophet, a writer with the clairvoyance to predict our ever-growing mania for fame in whatever form and at whatever cost, as well as our escalating harebrained devotion to questionable methods of self-improvement—tantric chanting for wealth, ayahuasca retreats, take your pick. He wasn’t just chasing the zeitgeist. He was full-on tackling it.
By West’s standards, today’s “stars” have it easy. It is no longer necessary to be discovered or screen-tested or vetted by a studio exec when you hold your own studio in the palm of your hand. And boy, would Hackett’s love interest, Faye Greener (a desperate young woman who declares, “I’m going to be a star some day.… If I’m not, I’ll commit suicide”), have thrived in our century. In West’s novel, she is limited to being the center of a circus of her own making: a volatile love pentagon including Hackett; the bumbling Homer Simpson; Earle Shoop, a horse-opera actor who doesn’t work much; and Miguel, a cockfighter. She gins up rivalries, teases and torments. I’ll forgive you if you find her behavior extreme and perhaps a bit repulsive. But don’t write it off as exaggeration. West knew exactly what he was doing. I’m not calling him a mystic, but he was bang on the money as to how far people will go to have the spotlight turned on them.
When it comes to real-world events, however, there is something that West got wrong—or rather that Hackett does. The mob he imagines has come to Los Angeles to participate in its own destruction proves to be blameless, at least as far as the city’s ruination is concerned. As Los Angeles burned in January 2025, these people were not the culprits, or the eager witnesses to the holocaust Hackett envisioned. Instead, they were people who, it turns out, loved this city despite the difficulties it had imposed on them, who didn’t get to be part of the American dream but nevertheless lost everything.
And that is the modern-day tragedy of West’s novel. The ones who Hackett imagines came to Los Angeles to die were not destroyed by their violent malaise, nor did they actually wish to destroy the only city strange enough to harbor their mania and outsize passions. Instead, they—we—became victims of circumstances beyond anyone’s control: the careless collateral damage of climate change that may eventually eradicate the city they secretly love even if it does not love them back.•
Ivy Pochoda is the author of four novels, most recently These Women, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award. Her new novel, Sing Her Down, will be published in May.
