Wag the Dog

Wag the Dog is the reissue title of Larry Beinhart's 1993 American Hero, retitled to match the 1997 David Mamet film adaptation that brought the novel to a wider audience. The premise 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 Wag the Dog 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. Fans of Christopher Buckley's political satire or Joseph Heller's Closing Time will recognize the careful late-Cold-War political-comedy register.

The book reads as a 1993 artifact in places. The argument has aged better than the surface specifics.

Four stars. The Wag the Dog Larry Beinhart novel is the source for one of the sharper political satires of the 90s. Recommended for readers interested in the original and for fans of the film who want the sharper longer version of the same material.