Matthew Specktor

There is not a single misstep in this book. From the flawlessly executed grammar and structure of the style to the deft and consummate interweaving of theme with character and story, THE AMERICAN DREAM MACHINE relates the story of fathers and sons in the fat post-studio years of the movie industry. Specktor shows tremendous, loving insight into the L.A. of the recent past to the present. He does so through the eyes of Nate Myer, the illegitimate son of a Hollywood agent and movie producer, as he relates his father’s rise to the top of his power with his ecstatic victories, crushing losses and personal costs, to the gradual but relentless fall to nothingness that haunts each lifespan of the Hollywood elite.

The natural environment and the geography of L.A. are ever present, both in the background, (even when the scene shifts briefly to N.Y.C.!) and in the action of the plot. “God’s palm, checkered with twinkling lights and crossed with hot wind.” Specktor succeeds where so many writers fail in capturing that special, magical L.A. light that infuses the atmosphere when the inversion layer and all the elements unite just right. Throughout, L.A. is a central character. Clearly the author has a profound understanding and abiding affection for the place. Not only the physical L.A. and its environs, but also the psychological L.A., where where you are is who you are. He depicts his characters and the people with whom they rub shoulders drifting from party to party, each party like a point on a map of their Hollywood lives; and landing in The Valley lands you without an identity in an alternate universe, but always with the possibility of transformation. This affection Specktor exhibits extends to some of the shadier sides of the movie industry as well. He can even write of the industry’s attachment to cocaine with affection, and acid trips when, “the air scissored with hallucination.” Such intimacy with the place and idea of L.A. naturally results in tremendous insights gracefully conveyed to the reader. One, in particular, appears toward the end of the story when the older, obsolete Beau stands in a neighborhood surrounded by the Present Day gods of relevance and observes that, “They were more current, if not more enduring.” And L.A. is ever there, right there observing everything that happens, including Beau’s final humiliation when he looks up and sees “the sky a luminous bronze, a color that might have been called ‘blaze of glory,’ except that Beau had nothing in his pocket to match it. A half chubby? A bruised kidney? How poor is man’s equipment, in the end.”

Perfectly interwoven with Hollywood/L.A., the place, is the movie industry itself. At one point, Beau contemplates a tangerine sitting on his partner’s desk: “Will’s desk was so clean you could eat off it; so clean it gave back the reflection of his tangerine whole, the orange-bright orb and its shining double, almost more tantalizing than the fruit itself. Will picked it up now and halved it, then handed a portion to his partner.” In this way, we have landed in Specktor’s perfect metaphor for the Hollywood dream machine, better than real life.

Through Beau’s partner, Williams III, Spektor sets the story and its themes in a grand, classical perspective. It is Will’s muted southern elegance and his way of framing things in Aristotelian terms, like “tragic flaw” and “fate”. From the beginning, there is an elegance to the declines of these movie moguls, subtly foretold: when they are “not yet consumed by alcohol and disappointment.” And it will be Williams who figures most prominently in the climax, suffering a classic, tragic demise.

On Beau: “What could you do with a man like this, whose boorishness was inseparable thus from exuberance, and whose ugliness so shaded, almost, into charm?” It is primarily through Beau, the hideously ugly but charming focal point of the story that we see exemplified the most touching truth, that even in the midst of being a cog in the engine of the Hollywood machine, he knows to hang onto the most important thing: his children and his love for them; and this is exhibited in the tiniest, most physical way, through feeling the warmth of his son’s scalp as he lays his hand on his head, just before walking away from a massive business failure. In another moment, as Beau is being sucked back into the machine that is Hollywood, we have the foreshadowing of terrible things to come while Specktor deftly and elegantly integrates a number of dynamic threads in a single moment: grunt work, fatherhood, love and ambition. Beau has fallen to working in a sporting goods store and has received a call from a former colleague. As he wrestles with the prospect of returning to producing, he contemplates the chewing gum in the display case below him and ponders his daughter’s favorite flavors.

Without any sentimentality, Specktor captures the strangeness of childhood in the interactions between fathers and sons, the forays of boys into adolescence with all the mistakes made within the safety of their friendship while trying to be cool, as well as childhood’s harshness and meanness, but without becoming dark. In an illustrative scene, Williams Farquarsen the father, coaches the three young boys: the narrator, his half brother and their best friend, his son, Williams Farquarsen IV, on the school playground. After pushing these eight-year-olds beyond their limit and withholding water or rest for over an hour, they collapse into the backseat of his Peugeot. It isn’t until the three boys are sweating in the cramped backseat of the car, waiting for Farquarsen senior to emerge from a law office on the way home that Little Will notices Nate’s leg bleeding. Specktor’s account of Nate’s progression from tears to screaming, all in response to his friend’s father’s concern, is genius. It stands alone in its literary value; but, as it turns out, also serves as a key passage to a deeper understanding of the climax of the book. This scene is only one of many that brings a kind of clarity to the dynamics between sons and fathers, their own and their best friends’.… (mer)