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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
brings period to life, evoking feelings and exploring the ideas,
By Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Hollywood (Paperback)
This is unquestionably one of the best of Vidal's longitudinal series on the governing classes of the US. While the cover is something of a double misnomer - Hollywood is more of a theme than the plot and it barely gets into the 20s - the book offers a deep and hilarious view of what was going on in the period. You feel what it was like (for some of the monied elite) to be there as witnesses and occasionally shapers of events, which is the essence of successful historical fiction, making the reader curious to look to history books for greater detail and analyis. Indeed, I found this volume to be Vidal's most subtle since Lincoln, full of themes and concepts that fascinate and titillate. It is often difficult to know where Vidal stands, at least for me, and that is a big part of the fun.
In addition to the usual characters of the Sanford sibs and Sen. Day, at the center of the novel is Woodrow Wilson. You watch his decline, at once political - he loses his grip on the nation's political imagination with WWI and then the wrangle over the League of Nations - and physical. While he was indeed a messianic idealist, Vidal also creates a very human portrait of him that I read as sympathetic and, while typically sarcastic, almost entirely lacking in vidalian cynicism. You get Wilson's vision of the future as well, which events were surpassing as he dug in his heals, pointing directly to WWII. The nation at war, with all of the moral principles so blithely thrown about, also appeared to me as a prescient evocation of a key part of the American character, its narcissistic belief in the face of contrary evidence that it always acts for a righteous cause on the good guys side - just look at the current war in Iraq! More particularly, Vidal portrays the repression of free speech and the blatant hypocracy in light of our stated constitutional ideals. But there is also WG Harding and his courtiers, who added up to a disastrous mix of executive inattention and the crudest corruption, complete with murdered scapegoats. This too is a huge part of the American system, the desire to let things go and seek the good life while the rats are chewing out the bottom of the barrel. Sound familar? Again, it seems so prescient. Lastly, there is a taste of the power that Hollywood was becoming. This was the most unexpected part for me, as I am a hardened political junkie and quite ignorent of this part of American culture. Essentially, Vidal questions whether the incipient movie moguls' vision - that of shaping the dreams of the American psyche - will become more important than the shenanigans going on in Wash, DC. As such, his characters see a progression from politicians telling people what to believe, through Hearst's yellow journalism evoking what they should fear, to the far deeper tappng into the public's collective unconscious. That Vidal succeeds in getting a person as jaded as I am to take a new look at so many things is indeed a feat. Recommended as one of the best of the series. Now that I have read them all, I feel I must go back through the entire series to see more subtle linkages. This series is a wonderful experiment in a new style of hyper novel.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Hollywood by Gore Vidal,
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This review is from: Hollywood (Paperback)
With an absolute grip on detail, Gore Vidal describes an era: the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding. Vidal's storytelling skills are venerable, however, the text often reads like a stream of consciousness rather than one marked by satisfying conclusions on his characters' actions. Rather than being swept up in the narrative, I kept getting lost in the vast number of characters introduced. Vidal's incisive wit seems to have been tempered by age to the point of blandness at times.. Hearst, Hollywood, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt drift through the pages without bringing impact to the story.
I still love anything Vidal writes, but this book disappointed me. Judith Clancy Kyoto, Japan
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Vidal's marriage of Hollywood and Washington,
By Brian Bess (Huntsville, AL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Hollywood (Paperback)
The fifth novel, chronologically, of Gore Vidal's American chronicle series deals with much more than the evolution of the industry that bears the title of this book. There is at least as much political chicanery in Washington as movie-making propagandizing in Hollywood. Politics runs through Vidal's blood so he can never escape the subject entirely. The dual career of Caroline Sanford as east coast newspaper publisher and west coast starlet, while not completely implausible, seems to be a way of weaving the world of the entertainment capital into the fabric of the political capital. I was quite interested in many of the strands of both stories but I felt they were welded together more than organically linked.I have read the American chronicle novels preceding this one and two of his early novels (The Judgement of Paris and Messiah). I had thought that Vidal had a workmanlike but non-descript style similar to Steinbeck's, at the opposite end of the spectrum from writers like Faulkner and Hemingway who announce their unique presence on every page. In the American chronicle novels, however, the god-like narrator is none other than Vidal himself, the catty, gossipy gadfly insider/outsider who can't resist giving you the inside scoop on every major development that occurs in his world. There are passages of spectacular wit and irony as well as a few in which he seems to be straining for an effect. Hollywood is nonetheless quite readable and especially indispensable in Vidal's American mythology and contributes new evidence to support my belief that he is one of America's most underrated writers from the mainstream.
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