For readers in austerity Britain there's comfort in a novel which follows the casualties of an earlier crash-and-burn

The Day of the Locust is Nathanael West's response to the Great Depression in early 20th century America. It may not sound particularly comforting, but for some reason it truly is.

As austerity ripples on in this century, the book's combination of escapism and relevance continues to draw me in. The language is so inventive, the characters so brilliantly (often absurdly) captured, and their behaviour so close to pantomime, that it renders the whole a garishly compelling and thought-provoking read. For me, there is comfort in lines that ring true, even as the characters falter and flail. (If horror films were truly as horrible as the scenes this book depicts then no-one would ever watch them. Yet I know I'm not alone in finding them squealingly cathartic.)

West chooses Hollywood, and its circus of grotesque clowns and cowboys, as the scenario for his 1939 novel. Throughout the post-crash years, while Hollywood's film industry bloated – films proved a popular way of escaping reality – the rest of the country wasted away. In line with the drudgery of the era, West gives little of the perfumed glamour of Depression-era Hollywood. His tinseltown is a place where dreams come to die. There's a strange sort of comfort in this no-nonsense approach to glitz.

Far from leading men and women, West's characters are the extras – the flotsam and jetsam, the "screwballs and screwboxes" – of the film industry. This carnival fools are as hollow and flimsy as the studio sets they frequent. It is perhaps this that makes their bawdy chaos seem hilarious when it might otherwise be unbearable.

Through the figure of Tod Hackett – a set painter who is of the gilded Californian world yet also, vitally, apart from it – we are given distance. Fresh from Yale School of Fine Arts, he vows to turn his brush to the people who "have come to California to die".

Unlike the other, papier mache, characters, we are assured that Tod "was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes". Like many others – Homer Simpson, the deadweight Iowan who considers waking up from a nap a victory; Earle Shoop, the Stetson-wearing cowboy from Arizona; Miguel, his cock-fighting Mexican friend; Honest Abe Kusich, a bellicose "book-keeping dwarf" – Tod fancies himself in love with the book's wannabe leading lady, Faye; but he escapes.

Faye is an aspiring teenage actor whose only role so far has been as an extra in a "two-reel farce". Her movements are staged and her treatment of men so cruel that "if you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper." For all her affectation, troupes of men become mesmerised by her. Even Tod finds her infatuating:

"Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stage-hands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed."

The pale imitations offered by Faye and the other Hollywood masqueraders are rendered all the more waxen through proximity to the silver screens and powdered cheeks of a flourishing film industry. West's characters are too ridiculous and their trials too absurd to ever truly smart. Instead they engross.

Here is a society that has generated its own grotesqueness, through a twofold process of alienation: the pre-crash boom has made strangers of all who didn't share in the green glow of dollar bills, while the exclusive hierarchy of Hollywood makes outsiders of the rest.

As the novel reaches its frenzied end, Tod finds himself outside Kahn's Persian Palace Theatre (a sardonic nod to Coleridge's musings on creativity) hours before a film premiere. He correctly predicts: "At the sight of the heroes and heroines, the crowd would turn demonic".

Tod is tossed through the ocean of disgruntled bit players in a city designed for stars. Until, fished out, he is offered a lift home by a policeman. The siren screams. "For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could." Fresh from the froth, he and we find catharsis in his escape.

In the small hours of Saturday morning, finding myself part of a London cityscape, with all of its raucous revelry, I find the thought that West had seen it all before, plus some, bizarrely comforting.