Life is strange. Allow me to elaborate.
The author Nathaniel West, a friend of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other luminaries of the word, died in a 1940 car crash when he blew through a California stop sign. He was 37. But before checking out, he wrote one of the great, if too often overlooked, classics of American literature:
The story is simple. The novel’s hero, Tod Hackett, is a gifted young Yale graduate; a painter with a love for the Great Masters. While planning his own masterpiece,
The Burning of Los Angeles, he ends up working as a set designer at a Hollywood studio. What he finds there, circling the dwarf star of Big Screen success like a planet of grasping egos, is a world of artifice, fame junkies, movie wannabes, failed dreams, and scamsters—all slowly baking to a pleasant tan under alien palms and a technicolor sun. The results are boredom, frustration, and ultimately violence. Los Angeles, he discovers, was built on a desert, in more ways than one.