Nathaniel West must be the only major American novelist known for multiple works whose "complete novels" collection could be contained in a 321-page book with biggish type. I read Day of the Locust over the last couple of days. It reminds me of the joke about the woman who complains that Shakespeare "wrote in cliches". All of the observations about Hollywood (the place and the metaphor) in this book seem like old hat if you've read a lot of hard-boiled fiction and seen a lot of self-referential movies; at some point, though, you realize that what your reading is in many ways the ur-text for all that material. No one in this book is nice, or likable, or happy; things don't start well for anyone and they don't end well for anyone; and no one today can read a book with a main character named Homer Simpson and not be completely distracted by this fact. However, it's short, it's a nice study in individual and group lives of quiet desperation, and thus it's worth a look. I may read one of two of his other novels (there are 4 total) if I get a spare hour.