- Paperback: 448 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (Aug 1 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0375708758
- ISBN-13: 978-0375708756
- Product Dimensions: 12.8 x 2.3 x 20.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 340 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #510,648 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
In the sixth of Vidal's historic novels about Aaron Burr and his descendants, the author has come a long way from Burr , the first in the series, both in time span--the focus here is on the years between 1917 and 1924--and quality. His imagination seems to flag as he draws closer to the present, and he delivers a surprisingly dry recitation of the facts and circumstances of history. Each of the novels in Vidal's U.S. saga has become more extravagantly peopled with historical personages. Presidents Harding, Wilson and Coolidge, and Hollywood stars Fairbanks, Chaplin and Mabel Norman make major appearances here. His fictional protagonists--Caroline Sanford and Burden Day, also the main characters of Empire --seem on hand merely to be injected at just the right moment to catch an intimate glimpse of the rich and famous. There is no dramatic tension in Hollywood , although there are regular flashes of Vidal's wit, in particular a scene in a steambath with Fairbanks and Chaplin waxing grandiloquent on the nature of movies. The details of the Teapot Dome scandal, the shadow presidency of Mrs. Wilson during her husband's incapacitation, and the difficulty of dealing with Harding's mistress are recounted with none of Vidal's usual relish. Although his writing continues to be clear and elegant, in Hollywood , he has failed to produce a compelling story. First serial to Washingtonian; BOMC featured alternate.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
" Wicked and provocative. . . . Vidal's purview of Hollywood in one of its golden ages is fascinating."
--Tom Tryon
" Vidal succeeds in making his history alive and plausible."
--The New York Times
" Vidal's originality derives from his as-
surance that he can create and command the American history of his novels, as much as he can their imaginary components. No other American writer I know of has Vidal's sense of national proprietorship. He summons the entire American scene into his confident voice. Vidal's presump-
tions work marvelously well for his
intentions."
--Richard Poirier,
The New York Review of Books
Also available from the Modern Library:
Burr ¸ Lincoln ¸ 1876 ¸
Empire ¸ Washington, D.C.
From the Hardcover edition.
--Tom Tryon
" Vidal succeeds in making his history alive and plausible."
--The New York Times
" Vidal's originality derives from his as-
surance that he can create and command the American history of his novels, as much as he can their imaginary components. No other American writer I know of has Vidal's sense of national proprietorship. He summons the entire American scene into his confident voice. Vidal's presump-
tions work marvelously well for his
intentions."
--Richard Poirier,
The New York Review of Books
Also available from the Modern Library:
Burr ¸ Lincoln ¸ 1876 ¸
Empire ¸ Washington, D.C.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
An Uneven But Gifted Sequel,
By A Customer
This review is from: Hollywood (Paperback)
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.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Title should be Washington, D.C.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Hollywood (Paperback)
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.
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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