Truly Monstrous

THE DAY OF THE LOCUST -- Nathanael West--Random House ($2).

In the 25 years Hollywood has been waiting, no novelist has yet written a good book about it. Few serious novelists have even tried. A harder try than most is The Day of the Locust, by a 35-year-old Manhattan-born novelist who became a screen writer three years ago, after writing a talented satire called Miss Lonelyhearts.

A tale of Hollywood's lunatic fringe, The Day of the Locust regards its characters as the human equivalent of Hollywood's architecture: "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 truly monstrous."

Author West starts off well, with wit, a nimble imagination, shrewd slants on the social roots of Hollywood's crackpottery. But well before the last scene--a world premiere which turns into a savage riot--his intended tragedy turns into screwball grotesque, and groggy Author West can Barely distinguish fantastic shadows from fantastic substance. At a similar stage of Tying to get Hollywood on paper, William Saroyan before him merely folded his arms, admitted with rare humility that Hollywood had given him "the smiling heart of an idiot and the good nature of a high-class phony."

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