The Manifest Destiny of J. C. Bloom is a big, talky, sharp-edged novel about movies, memory, and the way America sells itself back to itself. It follows Jonathan Blumenthal, a Jewish WWII veteran and Army photographer, as he heads west after returning home to grief and uncertainty. By the time he becomes J. C. Bloom, the filmmaker, the book has already made clear that his story isn’t just about Hollywood. It’s about the machinery behind American mythmaking, from wartime propaganda to Route 66 roadside attractions to the Westerns that taught a country how to imagine its past.

The novel’s heart is Jonathan’s stop at William Wilde’s Superstation and its half-mad, half-brilliant Wild West venture. That setting lets the book gather a wonderfully odd cast: Wilde, the relentless salesman with a theme park in his bones; Sissy, who sees Hollywood as escape and possibility; Portia, who performs even when she’s not onstage; Bill Jr., whose paranoia curdles into something dangerous; and Harry Jensen, the aging stuntman whose life has been swallowed by legend. Harry gives the book much of its soul. He’s both the real thing and a man trapped by what “the real thing” is supposed to look like.

What makes the novel especially interesting is how it talks about cinema while moving like cinema. Scenes are framed, lit, cut, and staged in prose, but the book never forgets the people standing inside those frames. The narrator can be funny, cranky, nostalgic, and cutting, often in the same stretch of thought. There’s a lot of historical texture here, but it doesn’t sit in the background like wallpaper. The highways, motels, early television, Cold War anxiety, Hollywood labor, stunt work, and postwar consumer optimism all shape the characters’ choices. When Bloom says, “Truth has no end,” it captures the book’s restless way of circling the past rather than sealing it up.

The novel is also about inheritance, not in a tidy family-saga sense, but in the messier way people inherit stories, fears, jobs, grudges, and images. Harry’s search for his grandfather’s guns is both literal and symbolic, and Jonathan’s camera turns that search into art, commerce, and eventually legend. One of the book’s most quietly sad lines comes from Harry: “We all wanted to be something,” followed by, “And something’s what we became.” That’s the novel in miniature. Its characters don’t simply succeed or fail. They get shaped by history, by performance, and by the roles available to them.

The Manifest Destiny of J. C. Bloom is a richly layered novel with the feel of an old Western, a Hollywood memoir, and a roadside American fever dream all at once. It’s conversational but dense, funny but not lightweight, and deeply interested in how entertainment turns pain into spectacle. The book is at its best when it lets its characters stand in the dust between truth and performance, trying to figure out whether they’re living their own lives or acting in a story that got written before they arrived.