American Dream Machine

Product Description

The story of two talent agents and their three troubled boys, heirs to Hollywood royalty; a sweeping narrative about fathers and sons, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood and, by extension, American life. American Dream Machine is the story of an iconic striver, a classic self-made man in the vein of Jay Gatsby or Augie March. It’s the story of a talent agent and his troubled sons, two generations of Hollywood royalty. It’s a sweeping narrative about parents and children, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood, and by extension, American life. Beau Rosenwald―overweight, not particularly handsome, and improbably charismatic―arrives in Los Angeles in 1962 with nothing but an ill-fitting suit and a pair of expensive brogues. By the late 1970s he has helped found the most successful agency in Hollywood. Through the eyes of his son, we watch Beau and his partner go to war, waging a seismic battle that redraws the lines of an entire industry. We watch Beau rise and fall and rise again, in accordance with the cultural transformations that dictate the fickle world of movies. We watch Beau’s partner, the enigmatic and cerebral Williams Farquarsen, struggle to contain himself, to control his impulses and consolidate his power. And we watch two generations of men fumble and thrive across the LA landscape, learning for themselves the shadows and costs exacted by success and failure. Mammalian, funny, and filled with characters both vital and profound, American Dream Machine is a piercing interrogation of the role―nourishing, as well as destructive―that illusion plays in all our lives.

Review

”
Sprawling, atmospheric. . .[
American Dream Machine has] a feline watchfulness and a poetic sensibility that echoes Bellow’s and Updike’s prose rhythms along with their voracious, exuberant intelligence.”
—
New York Times Book Review

“Specktor’s prose alone is enough to lure you in: it’s sharply observed and nimble,
like a more mischievous cousin of John Cheever, and his characters are wonderfully and deeply complicated, wounded and secretive.”
—
The Millions, Edan Lepucki’s Year in Reading (
American Dream Machine picked as one of
the best books of 2013!)

”
Richly engaging. . .Specktor sees his Hollywood characters as three-dimensional and very human.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle

“With coolness and precision, Specktor comes across as
a West Coast Saul Bellow in this sweeping narrative, but his energetic, pop-infused prose is markedly his own.”
—
Booklist

“Specktor’s book deserves a special space in the L.A. canon, somewhere looking up at
Pynchon and Chandler. Even as the narrator searches through his past to uncover the truth about his family, the author is searching, too.”
—
LA Weekly

“…Matthew Specktor’s
American Dream Machine [is]
a big and generous novel that functions both as elegy for a recent past and fictional anthropology. . .it evokes a world with casual ease and unexpected tenderness, recalling and referencing lots of other fiction (both Hollywood and non) while contriving to establish its unique authority.”
—LA Review of Books

“Specktor’s great achievement is to make familiar territory original, the Hollywood novel born anew.
It’s bold, weird, and unforgettable, as startling as a poke in the eye.”
—
The Sunday Telegraph Magazine

“Specktor
does for L.A. what Hemingway did for Paris and what Hunter S. Thompson did for Las Vegas: create a character that lives and breathes a city. Like hotels in Vegas, we see characters rise, grow dusty, and collapse.”
—
Daily Beat, Hot Reads

”
American Dream Machine takes readers into situations that might seem familiar: the drug-fueled party at a star’s house in the hills, tense meetings between executives, dimly-lit wood-paneled bars filled with players and movie stars. Yet Specktor’s
lyrical writing and insights into human nature elevate the novel into fresh territory.”
—
Kirkus

“[
American Dr