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A Film by Spencer Ludwig

The novel is grounded in research on cinema history, screenwriting, and camera technique, as well as on that great Hollywood theme of fathers and sons, and on the mythologies of poker. Featuring a declining father and his middle-aged, independent-film-director son on a road trip from New York City to Atlantic City, the novel investigates how first person and other types of narration, as well as cinematic images, could be incorporated into the narrative flow. On occasion, the first person narration is interrupted by screenplay form to capture the action as Spencer Ludwig, always making movies in his head, experiences it, and each chapter of the book is headed by a movie still that casts an often ironic light on the action and dialogue following in that chapter. The novel experiments with combining cinematic and literary-realist narration, fiction and autobiography. The psychology of family, especially masculine rivalries between fathers and sons, so often the subject of Hollywood cinema and of American fiction, is never far from the surface, nor is Flusfeder’s reading of Freud.