hangover square v. day of the locust

Just been reading Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square coincidentally after looking again at Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West. Both feature doomed lumpen lover's- in West's case it is Homer Simpson (yep, no doubt borrowed years later by Matt Groening) and in Hamilton's, George Bone. There is no doubt that for all Locust's nice touches and interesting tours of Hollywood low life Hangover Square is a far more satisfying read- though perhaps less influential- along with Homer S., the 'viper' song with its 'I'm high, high, high' chorus must surely be the inspiration for the 90's Hollywood Viper bar. Both the doomed lovers fall for talentless actresses who treat them badly. In Hangover square it results in murder, but the real end is the declaration of war in 1939. In Day of the Locust it all sort of peters out in a fugue state that becomes a vague kind of revolution. Both books have survived because, among other reasons, the causes of fascism and dopey celebritism, respectively, are also the roots of the violence in both tales. Nathaniel West has some great isolated touches and wonderful descriptive passages but the book has an ill made almost improvised structure with long sections that seem to pressage the bad 'good bits' in de Lillo's Americana. (I'm thinking about Americana's end racing scene which was the inspiration for the novel but is handled so badly compared to the sparkling beginning of that book.) Hangover Square is innovative in style due to its 'pressurised' interior sort of feeling (handled far better than that old grand dame Graham Greene ever managed). You feel that Hamilton gives interior states their full due as ways of intensifying and making strange one's perceptions rather than the off loading of associative thinking you get in Joyce and Woolf. Enough name checks for a friday afternoon? I think so.