SOURCE: “Gore Vidal and the Screening of America,” in Washington Post Book World, January 14, 1990, pp. 1-2.

In the following review, See offers a positive assessment of Hollywood.

Someone has said that when you put the events leading up to World War I into a computer they do not “compute” into a war: The situation was too farfetched; the mindset, too irrational. In Hollywood, the newest volume in Gore Vidal’s American chronicle, the author attempts to place this debacle within its “American” context, and also—as a kind of glorified subplot—to record the shifting and changing of power within the United States from Washington, D.C., to Hollywood.

The novel begins on the eve of American entry into the Great War. Woodrow Wilson, the president who bills himself as “too proud to fight,” who ran for re-election as the man who “kept us out of war,” is...