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Bret Lott is a prolific writer, mostly of novels — The Man Who Owned Vermont, A Stranger’s House, Reed’s Beach, The Hunt Club, A Song I Knew by Heart and Jewel (an Oprah’s Book Club selection). His story collections are How to Get Home, A Dream of Old Leaves and The Difference Between Women and Men. His memoirs are about family — Fathers, Sons, and Brothers –– and writing –– Before We Get Started.

His stories of family, struggle and dreams are always compassionate and carefully observant. Sometimes they evoke a faithful wisdom, sometimes they slip into platitude or too obvious symbolism. But when he is on, when his eye is fresh and his drama tight, he’s among the best writers at work today.

Unfortunately, in Ancient Highway, Lott’s best comes sporadically, in occasional scenes and the last 70 pages of the book. But the premise is great: Take family lore about failed dreams in Hollywood and weave it into historical fiction.

In 1927 14-year-old Earl, the 10th child out of 13 in his family, hops a freight train out of Hawkins, Texas, and heads for Hollywood where he is sure he will make it big in “flickers,” the black-and-white dramas that swooned him away from his family’s poverty.

From his perch as a janitor on Columbia’s lot, he bumps into Walter Brennan, who tells him the mantra that will define his life — you gotta see and be seen. So, handsome Earl poses, preens, loiters on sidewalks, always hopeful, occasionally getting a bit part.

One of the best scenes in the novel comes when Earl gets bullied by Moe into a bit part in a Stooges short. Then, in the excitement of the opening night, Earl meets Saralee, a lovely singer performing at the Coconut Grove. She sees right through his bluster and hollow dreams and loves him anyway. Together they build a married life around Earl’s self-delusions and Saralee’s forbearance.

They will have a daughter, Joan, who eventually leaves them, shut out by her father’s fantasy life and her mother’s deterioration from glaucoma. And Joan will stumble along, trying to raise her son Brad as a single mother until she can’t and she sends him back to her own parents. By then Earl is selling colorful kaftans at flea markets and Saralee is wilting into blindness, but both are loving grandparents to Brad. Only after Brad returns from the Navy in 1980 will the three generations reunite in a reconciliation that is rendered with believable complexity by Lott.

While the ending and some of the scenes are masterfully written, combining Faulknerian ghostly memories and Carverian secular resurrection, the novel takes too long to do what it wants to do. What probably should have been a novella is instead a long, overly described slog through flat scenes that needed to be edited by half.