Publishers Weekly
★ 06/28/2021
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. (July)
Vol.1 Brooklyn
"Its blend of cultural commentary and memoir is never less than beguiling."
The Millions
"Extraordinary."
Ploughshares
"Compelling. . . . [an] intimate investigation of one man’s imperfect life, the successes and failures, and most importantly, the realization that who we are now is everything."
The Los Angeles Times
"Remarkable. . . . Writing through his troubles, Specktor offers consolatory beauty."
The New York Times Book Review
"A novelist and critic with a sharp eye for Hollywood blends memoir and cultural critique in this study of classic American failure narratives."
Los Angeles Review of Books
"Specktor masterfully orients the reader within the West Hollywood landscape."
The Washington Post
"Revealing, haunting, thought-provoking and compulsively, compulsively readable."
Janet Fitch
"A haunting memoir-in-criticism exploring a very certain kind of failure—the Hollywood story. Specktor intricately knits his own losses and nostalgias into a larger cultural narrative of writers and filmmakers whose failures left behind a ghostly glamour. I can’t get it out of my mind."
Alta
"As heartfelt, as tormented, as full of feeling as a love story."
Geoff Dyer
"In Hollywood, according to Brecht’s famous formulation, there was no need of heaven and hell; the presence of heaven alone served the unsuccessful as hell. But Los Angeles has always been full of commuters on the congested freeway between both camps. They are the subject of Matthew Specktor’s continuously absorbing and revealing book, itself nestling in the fruitful terrain between memoir and criticism."
InsideHook
"It’s about Los Angeles, but it’s also about the writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Renata Adler, directors like Hal Ashby and Michael Cimino, musicians like Warren Zevon, but most of all, it’s about Specktor, how he relates to these artists and how they, in turn, helped him relate to where he’s from."
Aquarium Drunkard
"A blend of absorbing autobiographical vignettes and incisive cultural deep dives. . . . Specktor [is] a masterful observer of the weird tragedies and creative blocks that regularly befall artists in L.A."
Booklist
"Fascinating."
Charles Yu
"Specktor has captured the LA I know, the one all around me and the one in my head, a city of invention and grit, surface and underbelly."
Tom Bissell
"Haunting, powerful, riveting, unforgettable—I could go on (and on) about Matthew Specktor's astounding new book about failure, writing, Los Angeles, and the movies. With scholarly rigor and tenderhearted sympathy, Specktor excavates the lives of artists forgotten (Carol Eastman, Eleanor Perry), underappreciated (Thomas McGuane, Hal Ashby), and notorious (Warren Zevon, Michael Cimino), while always circling back to his own benighted Hollywood upbringing. This is an angry, sad, but always somehow joyful book about not hitting it big, and I've never read anything quite like it."
BOMB Magazine
"A work indebted to femaleness and its varied incarnations."
ZYZZYVA
"Eloquent."
Shelf Awareness
"Eloquent. . . . An incisive collection of artist portraits illuminates the tenuous quality of Hollywood celebrity and the price it exacts."
John Jeremiah Sullivan
"Matthew Specktor's Always Crashing in the Same Car is going on the shelf with Play It As it Lays and The Big Sleep and my other favorite books about L.A. I'm not sure what it is. A memoir-essay grafted onto a psycho-geographic travelogue of the weirdest town to be from? All I know is I couldn't stop reading it."
Kirkus Reviews
2021-05-12
Many people think we reveal more about ourselves by discussing favorite movies and music than when we talk about our own lives. Specktor tests that theory in his unusual new memoir.
The author, a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, tells the story of a difficult period of his life by writing about the creative people (and their work) that he was drawn to at the time. His picks serve to illuminate both his character and state of mind at the time, and they include actor Tuesday Weld, musician Warren Zevon, critic Renata Adler, and directors Hal Ashby and Michael Cimino, whom he tackles together. A skilled critic himself, Specktor offers useful context for some of his choices—e.g., explaining the work of husband-and-wife filmmaking team Frank and Eleanor Perry for today’s audience: “If The Swimmerwas the fevered delirium of suburbia in decline—a noted inspiration, much later for the television series Mad Men—then Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewifewas the chronicle of that decline from the inside out: Mad Men, if January Jones’s Betty Draper were the protagonist of that show, with her husband Don nothing but a condescending, insufferable satellite.” Specktor also explains how his admiration for Five Easy Piecesscreenwriter Carole Eastman is wrapped in his conflicted thoughts of his screenwriter mother and his own stalled screenwriting career. Those personal moments are the strongest in the book—how Zevon’s music was the soundtrack to a painful family moment, how an ailing friend connected him to Weld’s work, how he idolized Thomas McGuane, whose work “cemented in place what had begun with Fitzgerald: my wish to strike sentences into being.” But whenever he reveals a bit of himself, Specktor quickly pulls back to the comfort of film history or deep descriptions of his Hollywood neighborhood.
Specktor delivers interesting pieces of criticism, reporting, and self-help in this unique memoir, but the whole falls short.
