Machine Dreams

by Jayne Anne Phillips

Called “an enduring literary achievement . . . astonishing” by The New York Times, this highly acclaimed debut novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Night Watch introduces the Hampsons, an ordinary, small-town American family profoundly affected by the extraordinary events of history—from the Depression to the Vietnam War.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Here is a stunning chronicle that is revealed in the thoughts, dreams, and memories of each member of the Hampson family. Mitch struggles to earn a living as Jeans becomes the main breadwinner, working to complete college and raise the family. While the couple fight to keep their marriage intact, their daughter Danner and son Billy forge a sibling bond of uncommon strength. When Billy goes off to Vietnam, Danner becomes the sole bond linking her family, whose dissolution mirrors the fractured state of America in the 1960s. Deeply felt and vividly imagined, this lyrical novel is "among the wisest of a generation to grapple with a war that maimed us all" (The Village Voice), by a master of contemporary fiction.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, War, Literary Fiction, Classics, Historical, Novels

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, and Quiet Dell. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bunting Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Winner of an Arts and Letters Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2018. A National Book Award finalist, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she lives in New York and Boston.

Reviews

[Alena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much that when I turned the final page, I hugged the book to my body and just sat with it a while. I first fell in love with Jayne Anne Phillipswhen I read Lark & Termiteback in 2010 and I’ve been reading (and loving) her novels ever since. I was a little afraid to finally read this, her first novel published in 1984, scared that she wouldn’t have yet developed her skills for character development or the slow unfolding of story.

Thankfully, my fears were unfounded. Phillips seems born to write for me. I love the style of alternating stories, shifting perspectives, working the story from the outside and slowly closing in on the important pieces. Phillips allows me to get to know her characters as an observer instead of describing their personalities in obvious ways.

"The sound of her father was a wary lumbering sound, nearly fragile, his heaviness changed by the slippers, the dark, his legs naked and white in his short robe, the sound of his walking at once shy and violent."

"She would always be herself, pretty and tarnished."

In writing this way, she lets me do some of the imagining. I had no trouble picturing her places of people, whether she was writing about WWII, small-town America or Viet Nam. She’s writing about serious topics, life-changing events, the big story…but she does it in such a small, quiet, personal way that I was quite moved.

"Death wouldn't let you forget, would it? Life did; life let you go in for long weeks and never think at all."

Absolutely thrilled I finally pulled this one from the TBR shelf. I will easily recommend to others.
Author read-alike: Carol Shields

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't sure how to review this until I happened to come across a phrase I wrote about another book: "As with many of the novels I end up really liking, I found that the ending really 'made' the book for me." That is exactly how I felt about Machine Dreams.

It's beautifully written throughout, with details of a childhood and a close-in-age, sibling (older sister/younger brother) relationship I easily identified with.

Before reading, I wondered if I would like a book that had the word 'machine' in the title, but none of the 'mechanical' descriptions ended up boring me. Besides, the word 'machine' is used to encompass much more than I originally thought it would; I was impressed. The metaphors of machines, dreams and other things are worn lightly and effectively.

[Lloyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the outset of this book, I thought it was maybe a BIT disjointed or that maybe I wasn't getting it.

Then I began to see what Phillips was going for: moving us through the lives and locales of her characters, letting us experience monumental eras and events in history THROUGH her characters, and it all began to come together.

The book started to remind me of reading Salinger's chronicles of the Glass family (spread all throughout HIS works) and that's definitely a GOOD thing, as Salinger is one of my favorite authors.

My final verdict? The book did take me a bit to become taken by it, but once it did, I was irrevokably enthralled. A couple of the characters towards the end were tugging at my heartstrings without letting up and allowed me to become totally absorbed in the story.

As soon as I was done reading, I wanted to start the book over to examine it more, feeling that there's more that this book can give us than what we can absorb over one reading.

Maybe someday.

[Ami Sands · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jayne Anne Phillips is one of my favourite contemporary authors. When I was very young, I read Black Tickets and was blown away by the beauty and power of her work.

I'm now reading Machine Dreams, her first novel, and am savouring the story, the voices, the characters, the beauty and power and simplicity of the prose, which never feels forced. The West Virginia landscape and history are vivid and the story reverberates long after the covers are closed. She is truly an American beauty.

I will read Lark and Termite next.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went to California on the bus and arrived like a refugee, knowing no one. I found an inexpensive apartment in a rundown house on a bay in a northern coastal town. I got a job in an insurance office. All I do there is type letters, pour coffee, post the mail. I have no diversions from thinking, and the thinking has stretched out.
Billy told me, during the summer he worked on the river, that some types of pollution actually clarify the appearance of water. The water grows more and more polluted but becomes clearer and clearer because the things that are living in it die.
Maybe that’s what’s happening. I feel very clear, almost transparent. My next move will come to me.

Jayne Anne Phillips writes with incredible flair and creativity, and although the plot was a little by-the-numbers, the execution of Machine Dreams makes this novel more than the sum of its parts.

[John Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75⭐
Lacks the nuance of her later works but captures a sense of place and culture with insights that uncover uneasiness and uncertainty about the future in a present that questions mores of the past.
Mitch Jean Danner Billy Gladys
West Virginia

[Thomas Claiborne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Beautifully written but ultimately a very uneven book, IMO. The first third felt a little clunky to me.

The ending is spectacular.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I thought I would go back there even though the farm was gone – just to see it. Go back to look at the fields.

But I didn’t go back for a long time, even though I wasn’t far away. When I was married and had my own kids I was down that country – selling cranes and bulldozers for Euclid to a strip-mine outfit. The land was all changed, moved around…out where the farm was – almost nothing. Heaps of dirt, cut-away ledges where they’d stripped. Looking at it made me think I’d been asleep a long time and had wakened up in the wrong place, a hundred miles from where I lay down. Like I’d lost my memory and might be anyone.”

In the remote past I read a book called The Machine in the Garden that had an old-fashioned American locomotive on a green cover. It concerned the impact of industrialization and the outside world on the pastoral ideal of America, as directly or obliquely treated in some 19th century literary classics. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jayne Anne Phillips had read it too, since her novel focuses on the changes wrought by machines, industry, and wars on two generations of a West Virginian family.

It's well-written and engaging, even though it follows a predictable yet probably realistic course. The men – father and son – are entranced by cars, big trucks, and aeroplanes, but the machines don’t serve them well. The dreams end in the Pacific War and Vietnam. Back home the mother endures, the daughter almost rebels. The past rapidly becomes another country. In West Virginia, even the landscape is stripped away.

If that sounds gloomy, it is – but Machine Dreams does not lay its themes on with a heavy trowel. It’s nuanced, subtle, and a pleasure to read.

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, this was odd. I'm not sure why this book landed on my bookshelf, since I don't think I've read any of the author's other books, and it didn't come through the normal Mary-book-club path, but there it was, with it's glowing blurbs like, "will rank as one of the great books of [the] decade." So I read a few chapters and put it down. When, a couple days later, I picked it up again, I couldn't remember a single character or anything that happened. So, I started it over from the beginning. A couple of days later I picked it up and the same thing! At this point I really thought I was deep in dementia. But I had just read an 800 page book the week before without any similar issues. Can dementia set in that quickly? From my Mom's experience, I didn't think so. Now, a couple of books later, I have concluded that this book is simply unreadable, at least for me. The characters and incidences in the book are simply so uninteresting that they don't stay in my brain for a minute after I put it down.

[Stefanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve had this book on tbr forever. I dutifully packed it for every move. But just now was the perfect time to experience the lives of the Hampsons in the decades that bookend this narrative. It starts with the end of WW2 and concludes with our active participation in Vietnam. The lives of this family are so richly shared through their individual voices as they struggle to succeed. If you grew up in the 60s and 70s, you’re certain to feel the details of the daily experiences they shared and to cinematically view the world as they saw it. Ultimately, it’s about the emotional experience of the Vietnam war and its effect on the entire family that concludes the story. Danner’s final machine dream is explicitly accurate. Many thanks for this book and what really felt like an intimate oral history meant to gently capture us and to teach us about duty and sacrifice.
Although not planned, I finished this during the Memorial Day weekend.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started this as it was a book that came up in the Wallace/Lipsky book and I didn't know her work. It's good so far, though I have been reading it on the subway in the morning and I might be too tired to keep it straight.

I finished the book eventually. At this point I don't remember it as well as I should to review it. I remember at finding it hard to keep motivated. I was not pulled in as much as I like to be. However, I remember feeling like it was the sort of book people in writer's workshops would read. Whatever the hell that means.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book only because I enjoyed the Pulitzer Prize winning Night Watch so much, and they are loosely connected.

I found this book to be beautifully written, atmospheric, and slightly unsettling, but mostly, I found it kind of boring. Until the last two chapters. They were wrenching and I could barely put it down. The book ends with Billy in Vietnam and it astounded me to read it from this point in history and see how little value this country continues to place on the lives of its young men.

[Jeffreyfetters · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this years ago, but still remember how I felt...bro/sis friendship that I'm always a sucker for (Mill on the Floss!). Add to that the malaise of Vietnam and that awesome skill some writers have for making ordinary, quiet lives so darn poetic. This was really sweet.

[Jeanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I haven't finished reading this but am done with it. Just when a storyline gets interesting, you are jumped several months or years in the future or switched to a different narrator. Very frustrating

[Jesse Agee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring. A list of events. Didn't connect with the characters.

[Paul F · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn’t care for this book. Writer had too many characters in the book, I couldn’t keep them straight. Was not interesting as some who wrote reviews stated.

[Dave Rhody · Rating 5 out of 5]

From her first to her most recent, Jayne Anne Phillips writes novels about ordinary people whose lives are forever changed by war.

She published her first novel Machine Dreams in 1984. I didn’t get to know her until very recently. After I reviewed a pre-release copy of Night Watch (2023), I went in search of her earlier work.

My pacifist views coupled with a lifelong fascination with the Civil War’s tragic impact on this country, gave me the perfect palate for Night Watch. It’s a novel about the painful ramifications of war through the eyes of people enduring the long aftermath of it.

Machine Dreams made me realize how aligned our perspectives are. Jayne Anne Phillips and I are both seventy-one years old. We both grew up in the ‘60s. We saw the latter years of the Vietnam War through the same twenty-year-old eyes.

Machine Dreams is not about the Vietnam War, until it is. The first three quarters of the book reveal the intimate details of post-WWII family. Mitch was in his mid-thirties when he returned from the war. He didn’t let his recurring thoughts of the trenches he bulldozed for the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers keep him from pursuing the American dream. He married a good woman who seemed ready to start a family.

My father did the same thing. He settled down and had kids. Like Mitch, he paid his dreams forward. Rather than risking the family’s welfare, he settled for a job that gave them a more secure future. For my father, and for Mitch, when that future arrived, so did the Vietnam War.

In Machine Dreams we see the early part of the 60’s through the eyes of Jean, Mitch’s wife. She’s not sure why she settled for Mitch, but at least he doesn’t hit her and he doesn’t stop her from pursuing her teaching career.

We see the late 60’s through the eyes of Danner and Billy. When the 1969 draft lottery looms, she urges Billy to escape to Canada.

Jayne Anne Phillips describes the deep contours of family, the strains and bonds that make them who they are. She’d relate to my hardworking mother who opened a small town bakery to make ends meet when her husband’s union went on a long strike.

I am the male version of Danner, protesting the war while my brother was in the midst of it. But Machine Dreams doesn’t focus solely on the destructive power of war on the family’s that are far away from it. It subtly catalogues American’s self-destructive trends from 1942 to 1972.

In his high school summer years, Billy works at the park along the river that runs past their small Western Virginia community. After keeping an eye on swimmers all day long, his final task for the day is take a water sample. He realizes that in just a few years, they’ll have to ban swimming as the river becomes more and more polluted by the mining operation upstream.

Becoming socially aware at an early age, Danner joins environmental groups protesting strip mining and begging the state to stop letting lumber companies from clear-cutting their forests.

Her mother’s experiences are subtler, reflecting the corporate takeover of small towns. Like most women of that time period, Jean grew up sewing, making cloths for the kids and later, when the war was over, she was so proud of having the money to buy a new dress at the women’s apparel store downtown. When Danner is about to celebrate her sixteenth birthday, Jean remembers just in time to stop at the new Kmart at the edge of town to buy her a new dress.

Jayne Anne Phillips has seen what I’ve seen. She doesn’t just remind me of the past we’ve shared, she reaches into the pockets of emotions I’ve sewn shut or ignored for a long while. Emotions as clear as yesterday wash over me as I read Machine Dreams, including the fears of things that didn’t come to pass.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book came through a search I did about what genre of writing Charles Bukowski fell into. I learned the genre(s) are dirty realism and transgressive fiction. Jayne Anne Phillips was the only woman author that I saw on that list. I was curious what she might have to say. I have to admit I was very pleased--not that I didn't I would be, but there were some reviews here that made me second guess my choice.

I think this book also falls squarely into the realm of historical fiction. I'd describe it as a coming of age story of Danner from around 1950 to about 1972 or so. The book starts before her birth with character sketches in the guise of family history. It was clear to me that Danner is the main character and while war and the disintegration of the atomic family were part of the themes, there were other less pronounced but just as relevant themes such as woman's rights, sexual freedom, abusive relationships, sexual assualt, drug use, racial tensions, etc. All of these were part of the "history" of this book.

I think the most important and memorable piece of this book were the characters. I loved the intimate view of the lives of people living in this time and experiencing their lives. As for the dirty realism components, I feel like there was a grittiness to the characters, but it was balanced by very real emotion and understandable regrets and sadness. The overall feeling I got from the book was pretty sad.

I think it was worth reading and I'd gladly read the authors other works.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I had a little bit of a hard time getting into this book, but by the end I was pretty invested in the story of the Hampson family. The story spans the 1930's through the 1970's, mostly taking place in a small town in West Virginia. Included are the difficult childhoods of Mitch and Jean, who marry and become the parents of Danner and Billy. I enjoyed the later sections about Danner and Billy as high school, then college students, and young adults. The sibling relationship seemed more defined than even Mitch and Jean's marriage. Each chapter focuses on one of the family members in a specific year.

I had enjoyed Jayne Anne Phillips Lark and Termite a number of years ago and had kind of forgotten about her until recently when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her recent book Night Watch.

"Billy suddenly wondered if he'd ever sit across some room listening to his own kid and get scared." (264)

[CYNTHIA · Rating 3 out of 5]

In her highly acclaimed debut novel, the bestselling author of Shelter introduces the Hampsons, an ordinary, small-town American family profoundly affected by the extraordinary events of history. Here is a stunning chronicle that begins with the Depression and ends with the Vietnam War, revealed in the thoughts, dreams, and memories of each family member. Mitch struggles to earn a living as Jeans becomes the main breadwinner, working to complete college and raise the family. While the couple fight to keep their marriage intact, their daughter Danner and son Billy forge a sibling bond of uncommon strength. When Billy goes off to Vietnam, Danner becomes the sole bond linking her family, whose dissolution mirrors the fractured state of America in the 1960s. Deeply felt and vividly imagined, this lyrical novel is "among the wisest of a generation to grapple with a war that maimed us all" (The Village Voice), by a master of contemporary fiction.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Dreams' chronicles an American family from the Depression to the Vietnam era, with people talking about "generalities with specific meanings", as is the case in most families. The father, Mitch served in WWII, but revisits that time mainly in dreams. His son, Billy, is sent to Vietnam, and describes things in detail to his beloved sister Danner, but never to his parents. Much of the 'action' in 'Dreams' is of the quotidian variety that make up the bulk of life, but Phillips' prose make every moment seem to be a valuable sliver of time. Literal machines do figure largely in the lives of the characters, Mitch and Billy especially, but I kept thinking of the phrase, "Deus ex Machina" - the God out of the machine. This was Phillips' first novel - she won last year's Pulitzer for "Night Watch".

[Sharneel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a product of the Vietnam generation, I found this book to be very remindful of the time in which I was a young teenager. There were so many elements in the story that reminded me of that era. The lifestyle of the young teens were very similar to that of what I experienced. And then the horror and tragedy of the young people who went to Vietnam, many of whom never returned, was made fresh and heartbreaking. Like Danning, I was one who would have advocated going to Canada. Perhaps the hardest part of this tale for me was how the sister never really recovered from her brother becoming MIA. I think the story was a slice of life, of which I had some similar experiences, and therefore, felt it was a trip to the past with vivid descriptions.

[Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Dwight Garner's NYT review of Phillips' newest novel, he cited this as her best work so I gave it a try. It's an interesting story within the framework of the generational family saga, beginning in WWII and ending in the mid-70s. Phillips overwhelms you with detailed settings, often to the point of fatigue. There are sequences of story without dialogue that go on for a half dozen pages, which is a shame because she has such a good ear for the cadences and beats of rural conversation. A couple of the characters are strong and interesting, the others come to the fore and fade away randomly (not unlike real life, to be fair).

[Libby · Rating 2 out of 5]

I absolutely loved ‘Night Watch” by this author. I was never able to bond with these characters. The story shifts between decades and characters. I might begin to like a character, then the decades would disappear and the same character was an angry terrible person. I found myself skipping long paragraphs of descriptions, rambling descriptions, in which nothing much happened. Even highly dramatic information is conveyed in such a sterile manner. It culminates with the disappearance of Billy, son of Mitchell and Jean, brother of Danner, who is MIA IN Vietnam. That is basically the end of the story.

[Kathy Katella-cofrancesco · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always wanted to read this and thought I would love it. In the end, I didn't love it and ended up rushing through the end of it, but I liked it. The storyline was very good, but lingered too long on some scenes, which maybe could be chalked up to it being a debut novel. However, it did give good insight into Vietnam and what the draft did to families. Interesting to me, since I was in grammar school and vaguely knew about the war (a girl in my class wore an MIA bracelet for a friend of her brothers, who was in the war), but I didn't understand it all at that age.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book much more than I expected to when I started it.... the characters are slow to build but once they're fully formed they grab on to the reader... and for this reader, I suspect Danner and Billy will be in my head and heart for a long time... It's written very much like a Steinbeck family saga.. with a nod to Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio"...the frustrations and quiet joys of family beset by problems in a small town from the Depression through the Vietnam War. Will be thinking about who I might cast as Billy and Danner, Jean and Mitch in a film version!!

[Mónica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Relato desgarrador de una familia trabajadora y pobre, aunque no tan pobre como los agricultores, de gente sin futuro, sin sueños, donde todo sale al revés de lo pensado, donde la muerte lo inunda todo. Gente corriente, con su vida corriente, sin salir de la pobreza moral. Todo lo hacen mecánicamente, y lo mismo que les pasa a ellos les pasa a otras muchísimas personas, La vida no cambia.
Alegato en contra de las guerras, de sus desaparecidos, muertos.

[Richard Michael Hernandez · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was challenging getting through this. I just couldn't get interested in most of the characters or the story. At times her writing was illuminating and sublime, but on the whole, it was a grind. I'm sure I picked it up because of a positive review that I read somewhere, most likely The New York Times. I'll do a Google search and look for glowing reviews, but for me, it was a disappointment.

[Gail Richmond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Told from various Hampson family member’s points of view, three generations move from WWII to Vietnam. Set in a small town in the mountains of West Virginia, Phillips’ prose is spare and her characterizations spot on. Lyrical writing and a worthy tale that creates a world true to the past and emotionally real.

[Rebecca Rolfes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the book. Hated the ending. It was like reading my childhood, adolescence and college years. Vivid descriptions of small town life in the 1950s and 1960s. I could smell the chlorine at the public pool.