Good evening!
It’s very hot, I don’t like it, anyone who says they prefer summer is a liar, and so on.
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What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
This week I have one book to report on, and I’m not completely sure where to start with it. It’s Gore Vidal’s Hollywood (1989), a book I knew little about but wanted to read because I assumed it was about Hollywood, which is also what the blurb suggests. It is about Hollywood in its own way, but this is actually a book about the second half of Woodrow Wilson’s second and final term as president of America, America’s entry into WW1 and the election of the Republican President Harding. The advent of Hollywood and film as a tool of propaganda is weaved into this, but only really slightly through the arc of one of its characters. This is my first Vidal, which is one reason why this was a surprising novel, and it is part of his ‘biography of America’ series, the novels of which can be read independently of one another but as a whole make up a picture of American politics from its founding. The series is, I have now learned, an intimate look at how power on a grand scale has been formed over time.
All of that being said, I wasn’t disappointed in Hollywood - I was quite rapt, in fact. Vidal’s style is quite nineteenth century, with long sentences that have a lot of clauses and close, domestic-like scenes (even if the scene is taking place in Congress or the White House). It’s also the closest thing I’ve read to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009), both in how it weaves between conscious and subconscious feeling, and in its assessment of power dynamics. This is not a simple read, as there were times that I went back to reread sentences or whole paragraphs to get a grip on where we were or who we were talking about (it’s a little Russian in how it will skip between first and surname usage, as well as nicknames or pseudonyms). When I was doom scrolling on TikTok recently, a video came up of someone saying that we should read difficult books, and we shouldn’t discount them because of our own discomfort. I would agree - finding something difficult sometimes isn’t about your own ability, it’s that the novel or text is doing something that we might need to spend time with in order to get to grips with something fundamental in the narrative or its construction. Of course, some people are more accomplished readers or thinkers than others, but usually they have gotten there by pushing through their own instances of discomfort.
The discomfort in reading Hollywood was worth the payoff, for me. I love reading someone who has a distinct style that you need to get used to, and once you have, you feel like you’re on a very fast ride. This is what this novel felt like to me, making this a very sleek political novel. I also think that the appearance of Hollywood as a side plot, despite it being a novel called Hollywood, was clever in how it appeared in the way it would to the politicians living and working in Washington - something far off, but useful when the time is right. The scenes that did take place in California were exact in their detail, zipping through the early studio system in far fewer words than I would use to describe it. This won’t be my last Vidal.
More next week!