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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
brings period to life, evoking feelings and exploring the ideas, October 29, 2006
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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Hollywood by Gore Vidal, November 14, 2007
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
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An Uneven But Gifted Sequel, July 16, 2001
By A Customer
Hollywood, at least as it stands in relation to Empire, Vidal's previous book on turn of the century power politics, is dissapointing. Vidal's old gang of power brokers, Caroline Sanford, James Burden Day, Blaise Sanford, William Randolph Hearst and the rest do return, though older and strangely out of breath. Vidal's main focus, the joining of Hollywood and Washington as collaborating sources in producing a particular type of propaganda -- America as it must and shall be -- is only forcefully embraced at the end of the novel. Earlier chapters set in the movie capitol, though meant to support this thesis, are unfocused and star-struck. Trivial personalities, simply because they were stars 80 years ago, are given the bulk of Vidal's precious pages. The deft and conceited Caroline, one of Vidal's best all-time creations, is really not allowed to say that much. Instead, horribly, she becomes a movie star. Nevermind that she is co-publisher of the most powerful newspaper in Washington and, if she were a more realistically fleshed out charachter, might prefer to stay there. Added to this she is given a filmmaker boyfriend. "Yes, this was her lover. Women, Blaise noted, not for the first time, had no taste in men." With his own pen Vidal dismisses Caroline's love interest, the hapless Timothy X. Farell. As we are inclined to do also. In spite of its flaws, Hollywood is a necessary read for those won over by its brilliant predecessor Empire. Strangely enough some of its finest writing centers around the lowly charachters of the Harding Administration -- as swinish, one senses, as their day. Washington is Vidal's comfort zone, the place where his writing reads the most accurately, where his charachters speak the most assuredly. In Hollywood much of those gifts are wasted.
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