Reading at Work is Good for You

on Everyman and Day of the Locust

Over the last two weeks, I started a new part-time job as a parking attendant for a high-profile film-related outfit in Beverly Hills and Hollywood. I am not exaggerating when I say that it is the easiest job I’ve ever had. On my very first shift, I recognized a feeling that had crept up on me after much longer periods of time at other jobs, that I was now doomed to a fate of dead-end work, forced to sit in parking lots wearing a high-vis vest for the rest of my life. It took me a year to feel this when I waited tables at a sushi bar, three months at my last barista job, and just a few hours here. Fortunately, my newfound self-awareness impeded upon the progress of this intrusive negative thought spiral. I know that this is chapter of my life is temporary, and that I can make the most of it while I have the opportunity to do so.

Ever since a major personal event transpired a month ago, I’ve lacked the motivation to read, write, or even watch films outside what’s required by my podcast. I’ve been neck deep in self pity and bong rips, trying and failing to numb myself. A notable bit of irony is that from ages 18 to 25, I couldn’t sit through an entire movie unless I was a little bit stoned. Yes, this even applies to stuff like holocaust documentaries. Now, if I’m even at a 2/10 on the green scale, I zone out within a few minutes and retreat into my thoughts while the images try to break through my indifference. I described the difference to a friend as Altman Vision versus Fincher Vision, with the latter’s sober clarity forcing me to reconsider what I had potentially misremembered in the hazy former.

I felt the walls closing in at my first shift, and I pushed them back. I decided that I am going to dedicate my time on this job to reading. I will get paid twenty dollars an hour to read. I will read an entire book on a shift if possible, and I will eventually start bringing a notebook to further extrapolate my marginal annotations.

The first book I read while on duty was Everyman by Philip Roth. Having recently read Sabbath’s Theater, which was funereal in its own right, I was taken aback by the frankness with which Roth treats death in this short, potent novel. A nameless character is buried, and He is remembered in equal parts by the relationships he had with family and lovers, and the slow bodily decay that started in his childhood and only ramped up its intensity in his final years. The deathbed scene in Zuckerman Unbound, the gravesite antics of Sabbath, and the Wellesian post-mortem detective structure of The Human Stain were high watermarks of literature on death for their attention to detail, mix of the poetic and the personal, Roth’s prose veering into raunchy Proustisms, and their relationships between death and other grand narrativized events of a life. Everyman, however, is largely austere in comparison. Its minimal jacket design reflects the unadorned, precise, deflowered language of the book.

Over my last two shifts, I took down Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. There is a floor of cognitive dissonance in this book for a certain audience, due to the deuteragonist being named Homer Simpson. Simpson provides the foil to Tod Hackett, a Yale MFA-stamped painter who works in Hollywood on scenic backdrops. Add a seventeen year-old wannabe starlet to the mix, and you have what seems to be a prototypical, cynical backstage Hollywood story, but it is West’s surrealism that elevates this to the sublime. The depiction of Homer Simpson’s simple life as a stoic hotel clerk turned upside down by his foray into Hollywood sugar daddyism is a time machine from Herman Melville to Bruce Wagner. The framing device of the story is a painting of the industry’s apocalypse that Hackett works on and eventually lives. A swarm of parasitic bugs who come to a fantastical industry town just to die, congealed into one anonymous mass, creating a Hollywood Holocaust.