Review: Booklist
The Age of Dreaming
Few subjects generate clichés more readily than Hollywood, yet Revoyr has steered clear of every stereotype while perfectly capturing the promise of classic movie-star dreams. As in her award-winning Southland (2003), Revoyr works in two time frames to illuminate the dilemmas confronting people of Japanese descent in L.A. In this virtuoso first-person narration, the fruit of Chandler and Fitzgerald, Jun Nakayama, a box-office sensation during the silent-film era and now a recluse, is contacted in 1964 by an eager young journalist. A man so cut off from the present day he still drives a Packard and wears clothes considered elegant decades ago, Jun is initially reluctant to talk about his past but is soon swept away on a tide of vivid memories. Writing with exquisite subtlety and evoking noirish suspense, Revoyr brings early, still beautifully rural Hollywood back to life in all its brash excitement through Jun’s cautious eyes. As he recalls the deep joy of acting, his heartbreaking love affairs with pioneering women, the unsolved murder of his director, and the racism that shadowed his every move, Revoyr questions our notion of success and lays bare the thorny paradoxes fame still poses for people of color. Rare indeed is a novel this deeply pleasurable and significant.
—- Donna Seaman
