American Hero

American Hero is the Larry Beinhart novel that was adapted as the 1997 film Wag the Dog (the adaptation took the political-cynicism premise and significantly tightened the comic register; the original is denser and more interesting). The setup is the same: a Hollywood producer is hired to fabricate a war that will rally political support for an embattled US president, and the deception turns out to be easier and more durable than anyone in the room had expected.

Beinhart's strength in the novel is the procedural detail. The Hollywood-and-Washington intersection is rendered with the kind of insider attention that the form sometimes manages. The political analysis is sharper than the film could afford to be; the book has space for the kind of long satirical asides that a film cannot.

The book reads as a 1993 artifact in places (the references, the technology, the specific Cold War framing). The argument has aged better than I expected.

Four stars. Recommended to readers interested in political satire and to fans of the film who want to see the original's sharper version of the same material.