Bookends

AN EMPIRE OF THEIR OWN: HOW THE JEWS INVENTED HOLLYWOOD

by Neal Gabler

Crown; 502 pages; $24.95

It was a "sustained attempt to live a fiction, and to cast its spell over the minds of others." The words are not Neal Gabler's. They are taken from Sir Isaiah Berlin's characterization of Benjamin Disraeli. But it is a measure of this book's range, seriousness and distance from the typical Hollywood history that Gabler can comfortably evoke an Oxford scholar's description of a 19th century English Prime Minister to define the achievements of the first generation of movie mogul-ogres.

Not that Gabler stints his descriptions of the rages and outrages by which, up to now, we have known Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn and their ilk. There is plenty of rowdy entertainment here. But there is also unsentimental sympathy for these East European Jews who, barred by prejudice from the genteel, gentile Establishment, created a patriarchy that was in its way more potent. The dream America that they placed on the screen -- an epic, colossal megafiction -- in time redefined the American dream for everyone. That empire of their own thus became a mighty colonial power in the world of ideas. Not only does Gabler restore to these pioneers their full, fractious humanity, but he also makes a rigorous case for their importance as shapers, for good and ill, of a century's sensibility.

FAST COPY

by Dan Jenkins

Simon & Schuster; 396 pages; $19.95

Maybe those shameless, down-and-dirty football novels, Semi-Tough and Life Its Own Self, worked as well as they did because author Dan Jenkins did not take novelizing very seriously and was rowdily irreverent about Texas and football. Fast Copy, Jenkins' latest, is longer, straighter, less rowdy and not quite so much fun. The background is 1930s journalism, including the early days of TIME and big- and small-time newspapering in Texas and elsewhere. Jenkins, too much in love with his subject, throws in every good story he knows about gangsters, FBI men, reporters, editors, oil wildcatters and similar riffraff. The effect is to scatter the novel's focus so that a complete, fully plotted detective story about a crooked Texas Ranger can be misplaced, almost unnoticed, in one , corner. A dominant central figure might hold all of this together, but the novel's heroine, Texas newspaperwoman Betsy Throckmorton, is something less than the gale-force wind that is needed, and her role becomes that of an agreeable mistress of ceremonies.

AT HOME: ESSAYS 1982-1988

by Gore Vidal

Random House; 304 pages; $18.95

"There should be a constitutional amendment making it impossible for anyone to be president who believes in an afterlife." "The time has come for the United States to stop all aid not only to Israel but to Jordan, Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. ((They)) would then be obliged to make peace, or blow one another up, or whatever." These pronunciamentos could emanate only from Gore Vidal in mid-tantrum. His sixth collection of essays also includes tributes to some favorite authors, including Tennessee Williams and Italo Calvino. But graffiti are everywhere: "Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us." Vidal has grown rich and famous by writing plays, nonfiction and novels. It is very audacious of him, at the age of 63, to attempt the new genre of nonsense literature.

THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY

by Fay Weldon

Viking; 201 pages; $17.95

The heart of the country -- small-town Somerset -- is where some of Jane Austen's young ladies negotiated their marital minuets. Nowadays, in novelist Fay Weldon's bracingly satirical view of the same terrain, women are poisoned by the environment, insulted by the welfare-state bureaucracy and, above all, victimized by "seducers, fornicators, robbers, cheats" -- that is, men. Some of the women adapt, like the abandoned housewife Natalie, who drifts into a love nest. Others cannot, like the dole-savvy Sonia, whose stubbornness drives her to violence and a mental ward. The chatty author tends to elbow her own characters aside -- and why not, since she is sharper and funnier than any of them? But she lets her feminist anger take charge, and ends up displaying not so much a fictional imagination as a one-tract mind.