the book club: New books dissected over e-mail.

The Golden Age

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

from: James Fallows

Well, Maybe the Glass Is Partly Full

Posted Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2000, at 12:19 PM ET

Greetings Erik,

Our problem, if I can put it this way, is that we agree too completely about the pluses and minuses of this book. If it seems prearranged that we'd both remember a 27-year-old essay on pop fiction by Gore Vidal (maybe this is like dotards forgetting what year it is but vividly recalling scenes from their childhoods?), it's all the worse that I, too, should have been thinking of Herman Wouk and The Winds of War while reading The Golden Age.

In raising the Wouk comparison, I think you put your finger on what seems wrong with this novel--taken as a novel. Wouk brought an honest craftsmanship to his sagas. That inevitably sounds condescending, but I mean it with respect for all the loose ends he took the trouble to tie up. He had to devise an actual cast of characters, and then go through the work of setting the scenes and telling the stories that would connect his imaginary figures to the real historical events he also wanted to depict. By contrast Vidal has been perfunctory with his imaginary figures, rolling them on and off the set, as if on dollies, to suit the convenience of the various historic tableaux he wanted to present. (FDR concealing his reliance on the wheelchair, the ascent of D.C. figures like Dean Acheson and Clark Clifford, etc.)

But since we agree about this, and since readers have gotten the point, let me explain something that by now may seem more puzzling: Why I, at least, have a soft spot for this book and wouldn't discourage others from reading it. Partly this is "legacy code"--respect for what Vidal has achieved in his 50-plus years as a writer. But the book has a number of incidental charms, which I could enjoy when I stopped worrying about whether it worked as fiction:

*We still see flashes of the Old Gore, "arch" or "snotty" as we may decide to call him. "It was his [a reporter's] turn to be taken aback. Like all prying journalists, he treasured his privacy." Here is H.L. Mencken, cranking out dispatches at a political convention: "He chewed a cigar and pounded a typewriter as if it were a candidate, while from time to time he snapped his suspenders, rather as if he felt himself in need of spurring, like a horse."

*The historical set pieces are, in general, rich and vivid. They achieve what his other historical novels have done: fully evoking the atmosphere of another time. For my money, nothing will touch the evocative power of the scenes in Lincoln when the president-elect heads toward Washington on a train, half expecting to be kidnapped or murdered en route. But Vidal does a very good, memoirlike job of re-creating the atmosphere of his conscious life, from the late 1930s until now.

I am assuming that, through a combination of personal experience and writerly research, Vidal has gotten most historical details right. That is, I'm assuming that the "mayor of Milwaukee" line was the equivalent of a typo and that Vidal is not just making this all up. At the 1940 Democratic convention, when Franklin Roosevelt was already visibly failing, he has Eleanor Roosevelt say in an address to the delegates: " 'Whoever you now nominate for vice president is ... very apt ...,' she paused; took a deep breath, 'to become himself the president and I am sure you will want that president to be the man my husband has chosen to get us through a perilous time and to a safe shore.' " I lack the resources just now to find out whether Mrs. Roosevelt ever gave such a speech, but it would seem to violate the rules of historical fiction to invent public (as opposed to private) statements. There are many, many of these rich scenes, starring characters who range from George C. Marshall to Joseph Alsop.

*When Vidal speaks in his own voice--which is not through the embarrassing character "Gore Vidal" but in memos and speeches from fictitious characters--he is eloquent and coherent in presenting the actual Vidal's long-standing view that the quest for empire is the ruination of America. I think I'll save for tomorrow further discussion of this worldview, which is presented more powerfully here than in some of his essays.

(I can't resist a further head-scratch about "Gore Vidal." " 'My mother insists that Gore writes just like Shakespeare,' said Corneila, causing the young--twenty? twenty-one?--author to blush." When you get to be a 75-year-old famous author, is there no friend to say: "Believe me, I'm doing you a favor, get that out of the book!")

With that, I pass it back to you. Do you agree that it's an enjoyable book as a book, setting the whole "novel" question aside?

Now, two bonus points:

1. About clumsy sentences, I will confine myself to one per dispatch. But here is another beaut. It concerns a character who, in her youth as a movie actress, had played Mary Queen of Scots:

Caroline tried to look mysterious but realized that she had failed: her face was no longer the youthful pane of glass behind which she could produce so many moods--even thoughts or near-thoughts--for the mass audience that had once been hers until age had struck her down in much the same way that the executioner's ax had taken care of Mary Queen of Scots on the screen while a giant philharmonic orchestra thundered the somewhat too folksy "Loch Lomond."

Vidal quotes some elephantine sentences from Henry James, as if to excuse his own by association. But that was just how Henry James was; this is how Vidal is when he's not trying.

2. About birthdays. I like the idea that we share one. We probably both like the idea that Peter O'Toole (living actor) and James Baldwin (dead writer) share our day too. But do you know who else we've got?

Wes Craven.

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

from: James Fallows

Well, Maybe the Glass Is Partly Full

Posted Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2000, at 12:19 PM ET

DISCUSS

E-MAIL

This week, our Book Clubbers discuss The Golden Age, Gore Vidal's opus about Washington and Hollywood in the 1940s and '50s. Click here to buy the book and here for an explanation of Slate's new and improved "Book Club" format.

Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum

What did you think of this article?

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Reader Comments from The Fray:

Mr Tarloff's memory fails him concerning Vidal's discussion of The Winds of War; [Monday] Vidal gave the book a pretty thorough drubbing. It was Mary Renault for whom he betrayed the sneaking affection. Alas, the sentences you fellows have chosen to quote are pretty dire, and it seems that the Lion of Ravello may at last be succumbing to the writerly entropy that drags down all except Saul Bellow (so far). I always found most of the novels a bit--what, astringent?--but let's remember him above all as the finest essayist our nation produced in the 20th century. The American Montaigne will always be welcome on that shabby table at my bedside.

--Bruce Lanier Wright

(To reply, click here.)

If I might rattle the teacups a bit, these two gentlemen are delineating fine points of the novel in an atmosphere so rarefied as to be all but unbreathable. What has happened to the Berkeley air?

I, too, remember with deep admiration Vidal's NYRB piece reviewing all 10 novels on the NY Times fiction bestseller list. Have our correspondents looked at the NY Times fiction bestseller list lately? Granted there are 15 books on it now, but no writer who prizes his sanity would dream of reviewing most of that sludge. But it was possible back then. It's not now.

My point is not that in a sloppy age Vidal is to be forgiven slapdash practice of the craft of fiction. By all means, summon Tolstoy and Joyce and Henry James to make your case against Vidal (if, indeed, those writers are precisely relevant to a discussion of The Golden Age?) But both of you go on to fault Vidal for writing about, caring about, a Big Idea. For pete's sake, at least he has one! Roth, Updike, Bellow-and Vidal--can barely make it to the bestseller list these days, and surely can't stay on it long.

Do you gentlemen who care for the craft of fiction note the decline that has occurred in the last quarter-century? Vidal does, I'm sure; and I'll wager The Golden Age will be more important, more memorable, than the finely crafted Jamesian ironies now propounded by twelfth-rate imitators of James currently practicing fiction, precisely because Vidal's work does at least tackle ideas. That's one of the jobs of the novel, a job few "craftsmanlike" writers today even consider undertaking. Please ponder that poisonous state of affairs before you start lambasting Vidal for not advancing the art of fiction in his latest novel. What art of fiction? Him and who else?

Besides, Vidal has already advanced the art considerably (to take a small example, consider the paradox that Vidal's Lincoln, beloved of both our correspondents, is about a tragic president yet is structured comically, like a Trollope novel, with the White House at the center of the action like a Barchester manse; this is a book written by a man who knows the novel form intimately). In novel after novel, from Myra Breckenridge to Creation, Vidal has stretched the form to accommodate ideas. To take him to task now for finishing what he--and, I'd submit, largely he alone--started with respect to American historical fiction is to underappreciate his considerable contribution. I'm betting that The Golden Age, even if wobbly, will stand alone as a kind of fiction not much honored, much less done well, these days. As a novelist, Vidal will take a tormenting idea over a tormented ego any day. That fast-fading literary instinct--you can't buy it or teach it in a writing class--is to be cherished, not trashed.

--Ivan Webster

(To reply, click here.)

Notes from the Fray Editor: There was this argument on which was Vidal's first historical novel. And Colleen wants to tell James Fallows "if you read Washington, DC you will find out all about Diana, Clay and Peter in the early years and it will answer all the questions you asked in your piece. He is just not re-treading old ground--it is a series and meant to be read that way."

Loki says Gore Vidal just is like that, he hasn't changed: "These types of sentences have appeared in almost all the novels I've read from him. I guess it's a matter of taste, but hardly worth pointing out, really...and what exactly is anachronistic about the term 'elitist'?"