Product Description

Continuing what has been dubbed his 'revenge on two hundred years of American history', Gore Vidal locates this novel in Washington. But this is 1917, and Hollywood is now competing with America's capital as the nation's power-base, just as it fights for centre-stage in this book. Caroline Sanford, erstwhile newspaper magnate, launches herself into the West Coast land of celluloid dreams and becomes, overnight, an international star. Not for nothing, on the dawn of World War One, is Caroline making films like the Huns from Hell. She is a government agent. But in Washington, that government isn't doing awfully well. Weighed down by his League of Nation's failure, by Roosevelt, Clemenceau, a stroke and the ship-like tonnage of his wife Edith, President Woodrow Wilson is on the wane - and Warren Harding is on the up. A popular, handsome, toothpick-chomping philanderer and dimwit whose wife is given to consulting spiritualists, he is about to usher in a new era. One of unprecedented scandal, cinematic extravagance and tawdry disintegration. The sort of era where the President could easily be mistaken for a film star ...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #307432 in Books
• Published on: 1994-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 502 pages

Customer Reviews

An intriguing study of early 20th Century American Politics
Gore Vidal has written a witty, intelligent and crushingly cynical book on a partially fictionalised history of Washington and Hollywood in the period 1917-1923 (by fictionalised, Gore Vidal has introduced a set of fictional characters, closely involved with the powers that be to provide a more personal picture of that time). Much of the pleasure in this book is the way the complex weave of world events effortlessly appear in the background of the lives of the various characters and how they subtlely shape the way they think without their realisation. Perhaps the single failing of this book is that it is all too cynical about power - those characters with beliefs of making the world a better place are invariably utterly mad and all other characters (written in a more sympathetic light) have their own self interests at heart. Nonetheless, I look forward to over the coming years reading the remainder of this series of novels.