The Best Hollywood Novel Ever?

Before "The Last Tycoon", before "The Day of the Locust", the former bombadier, tramp, bouncer, Imperial Valley fruit picker and soda jerk Horace McCoy wrote perhaps the quintessential novel about Hollywood with the quintessential title: 

 

If McCoy is remembered at all today it is for his first novel, "They Shoot Horses, Don't They" which came out of his personal experience as bouncer at a Santa Monica Pier marathon dance hall in the middle of the depression. It was made into a classic movie by Sydney Pollack, 15 years after McCoy's death in 1955.

But "I Should Have Stayed Home" remains the Ur-text in the genre of tinseltown disillusionment. Almost a precursor to "Sunset Boulevard" in its hard boiled portrait of fringe players whose crushed dreams don't seem to stop them from putting their bottomless faith into the very system they will never be a part of, McCoy's vividly stark writing style remains trenchantly modern. 

As a screenwriter for over a decade at various studios he never saw the same degree of success writing for the movies as the post-war fame his novels found among French intellectuals like Sartre who hailed him as an early unconscious existentialist. This desultory service as a studio hack and the self-loathing that came with the work, seems to have fueled and informed his insight into the memorable characters of Ralph Carson and Mona Matthews who are at the center of this short (113 page) novel.

Check it out.

William

 

Comments

[Diane]

Love the cover. Your next project?

[Pete]

I will check it out...nicely written blog!
Thanks.

[mh]

you should teach a course in the pulp fiction of Hollywood, or graphic novels, - ever thought about going into teaching English? you'd be great at it.

[mh]

you are such a good story teller - ever think of producing these for NPR?

[generic cialis]

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