Endless Fucking and Fighting
Matthew Specktor, American Dream Machine
Little, Brown, 464pp, £14.99, ISBN 978-1408704646
reviewed by James Pulford
Towards the end of the 1984 mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, the band look back on their career. Although the American tour they’ve just finished has been an unmitigated disaster — they’ve lost their lead guitarist, been overshadowed by miniature scenery and played support to a puppet act — guitarist David St Hubbins and bassist Derek Smalls are in good spirits.
‘We’re lucky you know,’ says Smalls, ‘people should be envying us.’
‘I envy us,’ muses St. Hubbins.
‘Yeah, me too.’
These lines are quoted again and again by fans of the film, perhaps because of how well they encapsulate the band’s glib self-centredness. Whatever the reason, it was surprising to see them echoed without a shade of irony in Matthew Specktor’s sprawling second novel, American Dream Machine. It is said of Beau Rosenwald, the book’s flabby, fatuous hero, ‘he could balance all his responsibilities. Even he was envious of himself, the man he had seemingly become.’ But the parallels between Spinal Tap and American Dream Machine don’t end there. What Spinal Tap employs in parody – the unremitting and excruciating embrace of cliché, the empty philosophising, the bottomless well of self-ignorance – American Dream Machine uses in earnest. And while Specktor’s novel self-consciously toys with some of the clichés of stardom and celebrity, it is far closer to parody than it realises.
The story begins in 1962 when Beau arrives at an LA talent agency looking for a job. He has come to pursue his dreams. What follows is a sweeping 450 page narrative that ends in 2005, loosely focussed around Beau, his talent agency ‘American Dream Machine’ and his two sons. One of the boys, Nate, is the narrator of the novel. As well as telling the story of his father’s life he tells us his own story, from permanently stoned teenager to successful screenwriter. American Dream Machine is ostensibly a story of marriage and divorce, failure and success, and rivalry and love, and although it is first and foremost a family drama, the setting is not incidental. Rolling forward through time, the novel traces the highs and lows of Hollywood and the changing face of the film industry. In doing so it touches on the lives of real stars such as Jack Nicholson, John Belushi and Danny DeVito.
In the prologue Nate prefaces the story with a word about what kind of tale it is:
This story I have to tell doesn’t have much to do with me, but it isn’t about some bored actress and her existential crises, a troubled screenwriter who come to his senses and hightails it back to Illinois. It’s not about the vacuous horror of the California dream. It’s something that could’ve happened anywhere else in the world...
But Nate is wrong. The story has a great deal to do with him because not only is he narrating it, it is also the story of his family’s history. Whether or not he means it to be, American Dream Machine becomes a version of the California dream. Strangest of all about this little caveat, though, is that while Nate acknowledges some of the tired, hackneyed conventions of Hollywood fiction, his story does nothing to avoid them. American Dream Machine joylessly creaks along on a chassis of cliché.
The novel’s contingent relationship to Hollywood means it does not work independently as a novel. It seems to have been written under the impression that the novel as a form has the power to take hackneyed Hollywood set-pieces and instil them with a deeper meaning or aesthetic by putting them on the page. But when Beau is overwhelmed by nerves in the middle of his wedding service and faints, or when the supposed family man Williams Farquarsen gives head to a cowboy in a car outside a gay bar or when Nate’s best friend overdoses on heroin in the toilets of a club the impression is not that American Dream Machine has successfully penetrated the superficiality of Hollywood set-pieces and shown them in a new way, but that it is merely repeating them in black and white and without the gloss that can make moments of this kind enjoyable, or at least watchable, in film. All the novel has done is to repackage and commodify what is already a commodity, and while this might have been interesting if it was managed properly, American Dream Machine lacks the necessary self-reflexivity to do this. The result is that the novel becomes ancillary to the culture of Hollywood excess it is trying to criticise.
While the prologue attempts to deny certain interpretations, the title, American Dream Machine, openly invites others. The title aligns the book, albeit ironically, to the tradition of the so-called Great American Novel, the ‘white whale’ of literary genres as Christopher Hitchens branded it. All anyone really knows about the Great American Novel is that no one knows what it is, aside from a kind of independent commentary on American society. If anything though, this intangibility becomes another aspect of the commodification the book keeps indulging in. Even a cursory glance at the book – a sweeping novel spanning decades, a book that begins with the life of an ordinary American – shows how marketable it is as a Great American Novel. As a result, American Dream Machine inadvertently raises a new question in the debate surrounding the Great American Novel: has what was once thought to be outside consumerism now been enveloped by it?
If Nate proves himself to be problematic at the start of the novel, and that’s problematic in the sense of being poorly put together rather than deliberately unreliable, he doesn’t get any easier to be around. Whereas writers like Bret Easton Ellis mollify their drug-dependent rich-kid narrators with a turn of phrase that is at least vaguely wry or witty, Nate is charmless (a trait he has inherited from his father). His fey, writerly voice brims with affectation, apparent when he introduces his mother at the start of the novel: ‘my mother, for indeed, this was she…’ and when, much later, he uses the same flourish to reveal himself: ‘for indeed, the writer was me.’ These two moments bookend 300 pages of back-slapping and infuriating self-ignorance, as when Nate calls himself ‘bohemian’ and then mentions his Prada shoes a few lines later. What American Dream Machine seems to be aiming for is the world of louche moneymaking and loose morals depicted in Mad Men combined with the novels of Richard Yates, what it actually lands on is a turgid plateau lacking wit or warmth.
The one thing of interest in American Dream Machine is the treatment of identity. Buried among the banal excesses and dull platitudes are short-lived moments of self-realisation that see the characters become aware of themselves as actors, just like the movie stars surrounding them. The following passage comes from the end of the book: ‘in a way, life offered just this swirling succession of roles. The most special relationship you had was with yourself. You played one thing, but you were always another.’ The mixing of fictional characters with real life movie stars again suggests that the portrayal of celebrities in the pages of our newspapers are no less fictional than their portrayal in a novel like American Dream Machine. Ultimately, though, this thematic convergence is pulled out of shape and suffocated by Beau Rosenwald’s ‘two-hundred-odd-pounds of heavenly joy’ and the endless fucking and fighting that make up the majority of the book.
On a line by line level the prose goes from the bizarre (‘in the hall the phones burped and purred’) to the brazenly inaccurate. When Guns N’ Roses make an appearance midway through the novel, guitarist Slash is said to wield a Fender Telecaster despite the fact he famously and devotedly plays a Gibson Les Paul. While errors of this kind are unlikely to upset anyone other than a particularly uptight kind of reader, the portrayal of women invites a wider criticism. This ranges from strange mutilations of cliché like ‘there is nothing like scorn to render feminine beauty’, via patronisingly zoomorphic descriptions such as ‘the mother hens clucked approvingly’ to the outright offensive, as when Beau’s fourth wife falls in love with him after seeing him doing his own grocery shopping, the suggestion being this is the way to a woman’s heart.
Specktor isn’t the first author to write a book addled with cliché and bogus literary flourishes. The usual tonic is a story so well plotted the action takes centre stage and the narrator’s voice quietens to a kind of low level tinnitus. Things keep on happening to Beau and his cohort – marriages, births and divorces, start-ups, success and insolvency – but there’s no sense of why they’re occurring. Characters vanish inexplicably and then reappear 200 pages later. The narrative ceaselessly stomps forward. The result is a story that reads as though it was built on the tenet of ‘Plot for Plot’s sake’. When Nate pseudo-sagely reflects ‘you came to a certain point in life, [when] you just knew how these things went,’ his words take on another meaning and describe the experience of reading American Dream Machine. The effect is a constant denial of suspense or emotional investment, compounded by endless foreshadowing. Nate’s obsession with spoiling his own story results in lines like ‘long before he [i.e. Nate’s half-brother] became a famous novelist’ and ‘I believe he [i.e. another major character in the novel who is healthy and successful] would still be dominant in the industry if he were alive today.’ When Beau finally dies, drunk behind the wheel, it feels like an appropriately pointless death for a pointless character.
Another memorable moment in Spinal Tap occurs when Derek Smalls is stopped by airport security and found to be smuggling a cucumber in his trousers so as to make his penis look bigger. While the look of withering pity and weary contempt on the security guard’s face goes some way in lessening the swagger in Smalls’ step, sadly there is no such moment in American Dream Machine. The novel ends with a final scene of womanising, followed by the toe-curling tip-of-the-hat ‘Reader, I married her.’ While the characters steadfastly refuse self-awareness to the very end, it’s fitting that American Dream Machine should achieve its greatest success unknowingly: it shows the dangers writers face in taking on the bland excess of the West Coast. In doing so, the novel is drawn in and drowned.
‘We’re lucky you know,’ says Smalls, ‘people should be envying us.’
‘I envy us,’ muses St. Hubbins.
‘Yeah, me too.’
These lines are quoted again and again by fans of the film, perhaps because of how well they encapsulate the band’s glib self-centredness. Whatever the reason, it was surprising to see them echoed without a shade of irony in Matthew Specktor’s sprawling second novel, American Dream Machine. It is said of Beau Rosenwald, the book’s flabby, fatuous hero, ‘he could balance all his responsibilities. Even he was envious of himself, the man he had seemingly become.’ But the parallels between Spinal Tap and American Dream Machine don’t end there. What Spinal Tap employs in parody – the unremitting and excruciating embrace of cliché, the empty philosophising, the bottomless well of self-ignorance – American Dream Machine uses in earnest. And while Specktor’s novel self-consciously toys with some of the clichés of stardom and celebrity, it is far closer to parody than it realises.
The story begins in 1962 when Beau arrives at an LA talent agency looking for a job. He has come to pursue his dreams. What follows is a sweeping 450 page narrative that ends in 2005, loosely focussed around Beau, his talent agency ‘American Dream Machine’ and his two sons. One of the boys, Nate, is the narrator of the novel. As well as telling the story of his father’s life he tells us his own story, from permanently stoned teenager to successful screenwriter. American Dream Machine is ostensibly a story of marriage and divorce, failure and success, and rivalry and love, and although it is first and foremost a family drama, the setting is not incidental. Rolling forward through time, the novel traces the highs and lows of Hollywood and the changing face of the film industry. In doing so it touches on the lives of real stars such as Jack Nicholson, John Belushi and Danny DeVito.
In the prologue Nate prefaces the story with a word about what kind of tale it is:
This story I have to tell doesn’t have much to do with me, but it isn’t about some bored actress and her existential crises, a troubled screenwriter who come to his senses and hightails it back to Illinois. It’s not about the vacuous horror of the California dream. It’s something that could’ve happened anywhere else in the world...
But Nate is wrong. The story has a great deal to do with him because not only is he narrating it, it is also the story of his family’s history. Whether or not he means it to be, American Dream Machine becomes a version of the California dream. Strangest of all about this little caveat, though, is that while Nate acknowledges some of the tired, hackneyed conventions of Hollywood fiction, his story does nothing to avoid them. American Dream Machine joylessly creaks along on a chassis of cliché.
The novel’s contingent relationship to Hollywood means it does not work independently as a novel. It seems to have been written under the impression that the novel as a form has the power to take hackneyed Hollywood set-pieces and instil them with a deeper meaning or aesthetic by putting them on the page. But when Beau is overwhelmed by nerves in the middle of his wedding service and faints, or when the supposed family man Williams Farquarsen gives head to a cowboy in a car outside a gay bar or when Nate’s best friend overdoses on heroin in the toilets of a club the impression is not that American Dream Machine has successfully penetrated the superficiality of Hollywood set-pieces and shown them in a new way, but that it is merely repeating them in black and white and without the gloss that can make moments of this kind enjoyable, or at least watchable, in film. All the novel has done is to repackage and commodify what is already a commodity, and while this might have been interesting if it was managed properly, American Dream Machine lacks the necessary self-reflexivity to do this. The result is that the novel becomes ancillary to the culture of Hollywood excess it is trying to criticise.
While the prologue attempts to deny certain interpretations, the title, American Dream Machine, openly invites others. The title aligns the book, albeit ironically, to the tradition of the so-called Great American Novel, the ‘white whale’ of literary genres as Christopher Hitchens branded it. All anyone really knows about the Great American Novel is that no one knows what it is, aside from a kind of independent commentary on American society. If anything though, this intangibility becomes another aspect of the commodification the book keeps indulging in. Even a cursory glance at the book – a sweeping novel spanning decades, a book that begins with the life of an ordinary American – shows how marketable it is as a Great American Novel. As a result, American Dream Machine inadvertently raises a new question in the debate surrounding the Great American Novel: has what was once thought to be outside consumerism now been enveloped by it?
If Nate proves himself to be problematic at the start of the novel, and that’s problematic in the sense of being poorly put together rather than deliberately unreliable, he doesn’t get any easier to be around. Whereas writers like Bret Easton Ellis mollify their drug-dependent rich-kid narrators with a turn of phrase that is at least vaguely wry or witty, Nate is charmless (a trait he has inherited from his father). His fey, writerly voice brims with affectation, apparent when he introduces his mother at the start of the novel: ‘my mother, for indeed, this was she…’ and when, much later, he uses the same flourish to reveal himself: ‘for indeed, the writer was me.’ These two moments bookend 300 pages of back-slapping and infuriating self-ignorance, as when Nate calls himself ‘bohemian’ and then mentions his Prada shoes a few lines later. What American Dream Machine seems to be aiming for is the world of louche moneymaking and loose morals depicted in Mad Men combined with the novels of Richard Yates, what it actually lands on is a turgid plateau lacking wit or warmth.
The one thing of interest in American Dream Machine is the treatment of identity. Buried among the banal excesses and dull platitudes are short-lived moments of self-realisation that see the characters become aware of themselves as actors, just like the movie stars surrounding them. The following passage comes from the end of the book: ‘in a way, life offered just this swirling succession of roles. The most special relationship you had was with yourself. You played one thing, but you were always another.’ The mixing of fictional characters with real life movie stars again suggests that the portrayal of celebrities in the pages of our newspapers are no less fictional than their portrayal in a novel like American Dream Machine. Ultimately, though, this thematic convergence is pulled out of shape and suffocated by Beau Rosenwald’s ‘two-hundred-odd-pounds of heavenly joy’ and the endless fucking and fighting that make up the majority of the book.
On a line by line level the prose goes from the bizarre (‘in the hall the phones burped and purred’) to the brazenly inaccurate. When Guns N’ Roses make an appearance midway through the novel, guitarist Slash is said to wield a Fender Telecaster despite the fact he famously and devotedly plays a Gibson Les Paul. While errors of this kind are unlikely to upset anyone other than a particularly uptight kind of reader, the portrayal of women invites a wider criticism. This ranges from strange mutilations of cliché like ‘there is nothing like scorn to render feminine beauty’, via patronisingly zoomorphic descriptions such as ‘the mother hens clucked approvingly’ to the outright offensive, as when Beau’s fourth wife falls in love with him after seeing him doing his own grocery shopping, the suggestion being this is the way to a woman’s heart.
Specktor isn’t the first author to write a book addled with cliché and bogus literary flourishes. The usual tonic is a story so well plotted the action takes centre stage and the narrator’s voice quietens to a kind of low level tinnitus. Things keep on happening to Beau and his cohort – marriages, births and divorces, start-ups, success and insolvency – but there’s no sense of why they’re occurring. Characters vanish inexplicably and then reappear 200 pages later. The narrative ceaselessly stomps forward. The result is a story that reads as though it was built on the tenet of ‘Plot for Plot’s sake’. When Nate pseudo-sagely reflects ‘you came to a certain point in life, [when] you just knew how these things went,’ his words take on another meaning and describe the experience of reading American Dream Machine. The effect is a constant denial of suspense or emotional investment, compounded by endless foreshadowing. Nate’s obsession with spoiling his own story results in lines like ‘long before he [i.e. Nate’s half-brother] became a famous novelist’ and ‘I believe he [i.e. another major character in the novel who is healthy and successful] would still be dominant in the industry if he were alive today.’ When Beau finally dies, drunk behind the wheel, it feels like an appropriately pointless death for a pointless character.
Another memorable moment in Spinal Tap occurs when Derek Smalls is stopped by airport security and found to be smuggling a cucumber in his trousers so as to make his penis look bigger. While the look of withering pity and weary contempt on the security guard’s face goes some way in lessening the swagger in Smalls’ step, sadly there is no such moment in American Dream Machine. The novel ends with a final scene of womanising, followed by the toe-curling tip-of-the-hat ‘Reader, I married her.’ While the characters steadfastly refuse self-awareness to the very end, it’s fitting that American Dream Machine should achieve its greatest success unknowingly: it shows the dangers writers face in taking on the bland excess of the West Coast. In doing so, the novel is drawn in and drowned.