Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California
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- 11,99 $
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- 11,99 $
Description de l’éditeur
A Best Book of the Year at The Atlantic
Los Angeles Times Bestseller
"[An] absorbing and revealing book. . . . nestling in the fruitful terrain between memoir and criticism." —Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage
Blending memoir and cultural criticism, Matthew Specktor explores family legacy, the lives of artists, and a city that embodies both dreams and disillusionment.
In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor’s first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood had, allegedly, broken him. Freshly divorced, professionally flailing, and reeling from his mother’s cancer diagnosis, Specktor was feeling unmoored. But rather than giving in or “cracking up,” he embarked on an obsessive journey to make sense of the mythologies of “success” and “failure” that haunt the artist’s life and the American imagination.
Part memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of place, Always Crashing in the Same Car explores Hollywood through a certain kind of collapse. It’s a vibrant and intimate inspection of failure told through the lives of iconic, if under-sung, artists—Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, and Hal Ashby, among others—and the author’s own family history. Through this constellation of Hollywood figures, he unearths a fascinating alternate history of the city that raised him and explores the ways in which curtailed ambition, insufficiency, and loss shape all our lives.
At once deeply personal and broadly erudite, it is a story of an art form (the movies), a city (Los Angeles), and one person’s attempt to create meaning out of both. Above all, Specktor creates a moving search for optimism alongside the inevitability of failure and reveals the still-resonant power of art to help us navigate the beautiful ruins that await us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Specktor (American Dream Machine), a novelist and film critic, calls on both skills in this fascinating look at Hollywood, a place that's "as much a notion as it is a neighborhood." To better understand his "gnawing fascination" with his hometown and its promise "against some very steep odds for ‘success,' " he surveys a range of "marginal" Hollywood figures who were drawn to its flame, but "whose careers carry an aura of what might, also, have been." These include film director Frank Perry, whose "modest" reputation obscured the "substantial" body of work of his partner and wife Eleanor Perry, thanks to the industry's "institutional and overt sexism"—a situation that echoes the careers of Specktor's film industry parents. Rock singer-songwriter Warren Zevon (and former paramour of writer Eve Babitz) may have been born in Chicago, but his music was conceived from "the mirage of Hollywood... like an all-night casino, in which every gesture has the force of desperation while remaining... fundamentally lighthearted." Meanwhile, an illuminating essay on Specktor's childhood idol, the novelist Thomas McGuane, considers how he left the "sheer California chaos" that both fueled and imperiled his writing for a quiet life in Montana. This enthralling work deserves a central spot on the ever-growing shelf of books about Tinseltown.
