Locust - Chateau Mirabella

Chateau Mirabella, or 'Lysol Alley,' was Tod's previous home in Los Angeles and is located on North Ivar Street in the middle of Hollywood. Based on a hotel where West himself lived when he first moved to Los Angeles, the location is a cess pool, the most disreputable part of a city embodied in a building. While Tod wants to move from the hotel, "inertia and the fact that he didn't know where to go kept him in the Chateau until he met Abe," (West, 62-63). Chateau Mirabella, then, seems to represent the same sort of shattered 'California Dream' that has cropped up in so many of the texts we've seen. For West, as for Didion, the failing of this dream is not a product of place, but rather the result of a distance between the general idea of the dream and the details of its execution.