The Age of Dreaming
Issue #36
by Nina Revoyr (Akashic, 320 pages, $15.99)
By Adam Schragin
Published: June 1st, 2008 | 10:22am
The Age of Dreaming is the story of Jun Nakayama, a Japanese-born man who emigrates to the United States, and thanks to luck and talent, becomes one of the most important silent-film actors in Hollywood. When a heinous murder and subsequent scandal threatens to sink his career in 1922, he leaves for England at the onslaught of World World II, only to return to Los Angeles later to dabble in property management — alone, forgotten, but not unhappy.
When a journalist sniffs Nakayama out decades later and presents a screenplay written for him in mind, the past is resurrected once and for all, and our former actor must finally contend with the past. It could be said that author Nina Revoyr’s greatest skill is her ability to weave the implications of a far-reaching social novel within the inherent readability of a good mystery. Like a seasoned thriller, The Age of Dreaming becomes difficult to put aside, especially as the back story behind Nakayama’s sudden departure from cinema is revealed piece by fascinating piece.
With the novel narrated from the Nakayama’s perspective, Revoyr never pushes the bounds of Nakayama’s self-awareness — her pacing and tone are so balanced and measured that his slow metamorphosis becomes a more believable one than in the hands of one of her more harried contemporaries looking to mainline for that unearned epiphany. It’s even an improvement over Southland, Revoyr’s previous novel, wherein the flashbacks and remembrances of the characters clarify the action, but also distractingly pull away from the more engaging storyline. In The Age of Dreaming, the pacing between recollection and the present come together without a hitch.
Permanent Midnight writer Jerry Stahl gushes about Revoyr’s “Nabokov-worthy sentences” on the back jacket of her novel, and while the comparison is a weird stretch — Revoyr obviously doesn’t aspire to Nabakov’s obsessive linguistic back flips — it’s a novel that perhaps the great author would’ve enjoyed. With an approach to race that is unblinking but rarely bitter — and a fascinating portrayal of both the Silent Film age and the great stars that “talkies” made largely obsolete — The Age of Dreaming will teach you a thing or two without resorting to being “teach-y.”
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