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Title: Hollywood by Gore Vidal ISBN: 0-375-70875-8 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: An Uneven But Gifted Sequel
Comment: 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.
Rating: 2
Summary: Title should be Washington, D.C.
Comment: I bought this book because it was ostensibly about Hollywood during the golden days of the silent movies. I found the beginning of the book so tedious I actually stopped reading it-- starting over again a few months later. After at least one hundred boring pages introducing endless Washington characters (trying to sort out their relationships to each other is mind numbing), you finally get a glimpse of Hollywood. The book then goes back and forth, with the majority of "action" (a term I use very loosely) taking place in the east. I enjoyed the last fifty pages or so. If you like Gore Vidal, okay read it. But if you are interested in old Hollywood--I suggest you skip this book and find something else.
Rating: 4
Summary: Vidal's marriage of Hollywood and Washington
Comment: 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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Title: Empire : A Novel by Gore Vidal ISBN: 037570874X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Washington, D.C. : A Novel by Gore Vidal ISBN: 0375708774 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: 1876 : A Novel by Gore Vidal ISBN: 0375708723 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 15 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Golden Age : A Novel by Gore Vidal ISBN: 0375724818 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 18 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Lincoln: A Novel by Gore Vidal ISBN: 0375708766 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 15 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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