The Nature of Hollywood

Hollywood: A Novel is a portrait of the spirit and manifestations of excesses that have defined Hollywood from its beginnings, and of the unease with which those excesses coexist with the day-to-day ways of life inhabited by artists like Hank Chinaski, who simply want to practice their creativity in an atmosphere of relative serenity. As portrayed in the novel, Hollywood is a place of exploitation - of those with an excess of ambition, ego and drive exploiting the dreams and talent of others, and the desperate reality and longing for escape of the public at large. And because the book is so provably grounded in experiences of reality, there is also the strong sense that the spirit of exploitation is as barely fictionalized as the names of the characters ... in other words, that it's ultimately just as real as they are.

This sense of excess...