The Day of the Locust recap

Tod Hackett, a studio artist in Hollywood, studies the disappointed migrants and marginal performers around him while planning a painting of Los Angeles burning. He becomes obsessed with Faye Greener, an aspiring actress who lives with her failing vaudevillian father, Harry. Shy former bookkeeper Homer Simpson also falls in love with Faye and supports her after Harry dies, letting her live in his house although she does not return his devotion. Faye fills the house with other admirers, including the screen cowboy Earle Shoop and his friend Miguel. After Homer discovers Faye and Miguel together, he withdraws and attempts to leave California. Outside a film premiere, the child performer Adore Loomis repeatedly provokes him. Homer attacks the boy, and the waiting crowd turns on Homer before erupting into a riot. Tod is swept into the violence, where the apocalyptic scene he has imagined for his painting becomes real around him.

Tod Hackett has recently arrived in Hollywood to work as an artist in a film studio. Beyond the industry's busy surfaces, he notices the many people who have moved west expecting transformation and now spend their days waiting without purpose. He begins planning a painting that will gather these frustrated spectators into an imagined destruction of Los Angeles. Through the successful screenwriter Claude Estee, Tod encounters a social world in which buildings, manners, and identities all seem designed like sets. At his apartment house he becomes interested in Faye Greener, a young aspiring actress, and meets her father Harry, an aging vaudevillian who still performs comic routines while trying to earn money as a door-to-door salesman.

Tod's fascination with Faye grows, although she regards him as a friend and makes clear that romance must serve her dream of becoming an actress. Harry's failing health brings the Greeners into contact with Homer Simpson, a lonely former hotel bookkeeper who has moved from Iowa to California. Homer is socially timid and physically restless, with hands that seem to express feelings he suppresses. He becomes devoted to Faye and tries to help both her and her father. Tod also moves among Hollywood's less successful performers and hangers-on, including the pugnacious Abe Kusich and Earle Shoop, a young man who has adopted the appearance of a cowboy. Their lives imitate the roles sold by the studios without giving them the security promised by those images.

Harry Greener's illness worsens and he dies, leaving Faye with little money and no stable home. Tod hopes grief will bring her closer to him, but she refuses the future he imagines. Homer, whose attachment to her has deepened, offers support and a place in his house. Faye accepts the arrangement while maintaining that she does not love him. Her presence gives Homer a temporary sense of purpose but also makes his emotional dependence more dangerous. Around them, Tod continues collecting impressions for his painting: artificial entertainments, staged desires, religious spectacle, and the simmering anger of people who came to California seeking happiness. He recognizes that his attraction to Faye shares some of the same mixture of fantasy, frustration, and appetite.

Faye settles into Homer's house but does not create the quiet domestic life he wants. She brings Earle Shoop and Earle's friend Miguel into their circle, while Tod remains a frequent visitor and jealous observer. A gathering organized around one of Miguel's fighting birds turns the house into another arena for performance, gambling, rivalry, and cruelty. Homer tries to please Faye and tolerates companions who make him uneasy, unable to state or defend the expectations attached to his generosity. Tod's desire for Faye becomes increasingly tangled with hostility. The relationships in the house now repeat the larger pattern he sees in Hollywood: people cling to fantasies that cannot satisfy them, then redirect the disappointment toward one another.

The unstable household breaks apart after Homer sees evidence of intimacy between Faye and Miguel. Earle and Miguel leave, and Faye disappears from Homer's life as well. Homer retreats into near silence, overwhelmed by humiliation and by feelings he has never learned to manage. He decides to leave California and begins moving through the city in a dazed condition. Tod, still trying to understand what has happened, searches for him. Meanwhile Hollywood prepares another public spectacle, a film premiere that draws a dense crowd of residents. The gathering includes exactly the idle, disappointed spectators Tod has imagined in his unfinished painting, assembled around a promise of glamour that offers them no real participation.

Tod finds Homer near the crowd waiting outside the premiere. Adore Loomis, a child performer in costume, repeatedly pesters the withdrawn man, treating him as another audience for a rehearsed prank. Homer suddenly attacks the boy and stamps on him. The crowd responds by assaulting Homer, and individual anger becomes a general riot. Tod is trapped in the mass and carried along as people fight, panic, and destroy the setting around them. His leg is injured, and his attempts to call for help turn into a sound he experiences as laughter. The scene realizes the subject of his planned painting: the people drawn to California by fantasies of ease and glamour erupt against the world that has kept them waiting. The book ends amid the violence, without confirming whether Homer survives and with Tod no longer safely detached from the disaster he meant to portray.

After seeing Faye with Miguel, Homer becomes nearly unresponsive and starts to leave California. Tod finds him outside a film premiere, where a crowd has gathered in hopes of seeing celebrities. Adore Loomis torments Homer with repeated pranks; Homer finally lashes out, knocking the boy down and stamping on him. The surrounding spectators attack Homer, and their violence spreads into a mass riot. Tod is carried helplessly through the crush, suffers a badly injured leg, and can no longer distinguish his own cries from laughter. As the crowd destroys the glamorous setting around it, he imagines the catastrophe he has been trying to paint: Los Angeles consumed by the rage of people whose hopes have been exploited by its manufactured dreams. The novel closes inside that riot, with Homer's fate unstated and Tod trapped in the spectacle he had previously observed at a distance.