The Realistic Magic of Matthew Speckor's THE GOLDEN HOUR, Part 2

In The Golden Hour: A Story of Family & Power in Hollywood, Matthew Specktor writes primarily about his family and his family’s relationship with Hollywood. He writes about his relationship to his parents: his interactions with them, both as boy and adult, and their influence on his decisions as an artist and a man. But, more importantly, he focuses primarily on them as individuals—on their inner lives. And he does so by writing like a novelist—letting us in on the thoughts and feelings of his characters, creating vivid scenes with action and dialogue—all the while making little gestures to let the reader understand how he knows what he knows.

This “novelistic” technique can be seen as a kind of New Journalism, made famous by Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Seymour Kim, and Norman Mailer in the 60s and 70s. (I’d include James Baldwin in this group, but maybe that’s just me.) In New Journalism, the reporter/writer doesn’t get out of the way of the story, as purists like John McPhee require, but instead put themselves front and center. They become part of the show.

The Golden Hour works in this manner, blending aspects of memoir, novel, and cultural criticism. In one scene, for example, Specktor shows his young parents heading off to see the newly released Bonnie & Clyde. It’s October, 1967. Dad’s hoping to become a Hollywood agent. Mom wants to write screenplays. They’re flush with excitement, with perceived possibility of the future—for the movies, for themselves.

One more snapshot of my parents in their innocence, one last evening before I join them on stage.

“Hurry up!” My mother’s heels clack along Hollywood Boulevard, ringing against the ceramic tile stars. “We’ll be late.”

Here Specktor tells his parents’ story from the inside-out, as if he were there and knows what they were thinking and feeling. The narrator captures their experience this way because he knows his parents so well, yes, but also because, like the method actor using “analogous soul,” he knows to bring his own experience to his parents’. What makes this moves even more audacious, is that Spector’s Character Self has just been born.

By now I have arrived. “The Fred Spector’s [sic] expect the stork in December,” read an item in the Hollywood reporter

There are places in the book even more removed from the narrator, moments and encounters he can only imagine. In one passage, set in 1964, the art editor and writer, Robert Benton decides to take a walk from his Manhattan office down Broadway. He’s fed up with what Hollywood is offering and wants to clear his head for new ideas, in particular a concept he and his creative partner have dubbed “The New Sentimentality.” Benton is a figure only marginally connected to the author, mostly through a tangential connection to his father, but the minor role he plays in the change about to overtake the movie industry is what Specktor is interested in. The narrator wants to captures an internal moment that embodies both the unhappiness with the status quo and the initial sparks of a new vision that seems to be spreading in a zeitgeist fire across the country.

He walks downtown, lost in thought as he moves up Broadway, past its luncheonettes and cigar shops, bookstores and bars. The boy from Waxahachie likes this place because it is democratic and, daydreamer that he is, he can feel himself vanish inside its flow of traffic. The movies are like this, also: you come alive in the dark, are free to be yourself—your whole self—as you are liberated from the mediocre constrictions of being an ordinary body in space. The city hums around him—engines, radios, car doors clanking and slamming, arguments, umbrellas opening and closing against a rain that keeps threatening—and he perceives both none of it and all of it: the external weaving itself into his being.

These are moves you’re not supposed to make in personal narrative, transgressive moves more common in a novel. But trends change, attitudes shift. The nonfiction novel. Autofiction. The graphic memoir. Hybrid forms all.