The Day of the Locust | Kingsley Widner
In the following excerpt, Widner examines the Hollywood setting and culture that underpins West's novel.
The Greener Masquerading
Early in the novel, West makes a distinction between the "masqueraders," the costumed role-players characteristic of Hollywood (and, more generally, of the manipulative, shifting, and anomic southern California culture and society), and those retirees and other refugees, mostly from mid-America, who have "come to California to die." They, representing the broader American society, provide the audience of the masqueraders. Several things, as we will see, go novelistically wrong with this division, but let us first consider the...
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