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The Golden Age

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from: Erik Tarloff

Seating Chart

Posted Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2000, at 5:26 PM ET

Jim,

In an essay on Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike makes the interesting point that writers are more apt to appreciate Vonnegut's work than casual readers. It's not that writers necessarily take him more seriously than his fans--they probably take him less seriously--but that they're more likely to admire his technical skill; they understand how difficult it is to produce those effects he achieves with such apparent effortlessness.

I'd make a similar claim for Herman Wouk. He's obviously not an "important" writer; his worldview is narrow, his literary aspirations decidedly modest, his reputation, such as it is, probably ephemeral. But he manages to tell a sustained, coherent story very well indeed; not merely, as you say, conscientiously tying up loose ends, but also keeping the reader turning pages out of eagerness to discover what's going to happen next. This is, admittedly, only a small part of what a novel should do, but still, it is something a novel should do. I doubt there have been any novelists, living or dead--running the gamut from Mickey Spillane, say, to James Joyce--who would disdain it. And the facility with which Wouk manages it is capable of arousing collegial envy, even from writers much more accomplished, serious, and respected than he (rather in the way an Olympian figure like Stravinsky could envy the ability of a lesser composer like Rachmaninoff to produce a beautiful melody).

In most of his earlier novels, Gore Vidal accorded such matters due diligence. I don't think he ever belonged in the front rank of American writers, but he gave good weight: He explored experience seriously, and he didn't, in the process, neglect his fabulist's responsibilities. He always put his suave intelligence at the service of narrative, and thereby managed to be both entertaining and artistically satisfying. He belonged, as Somerset Maugham once said of himself, "in the very first row of the second-raters."

In his last few novels, however, and in many of his recent essays and interviews, he has seemed to be trying the mantle of Serious Thinker on for size. And I believe that this odd, narcissistic ambition, rather than his advancing years, is what has led him astray in the current book. He has a thesis, he has a Big Idea. He believes the history of the 20^th century is the history of a small, powerful cabal deliberately and secretly seizing control of the U.S. government and manipulating policy in order to turn the country into the dominant world power. He seems much more interested in propounding this thesis than in making fiction.

That his worldview is neither especially persuasive nor especially original isn't the main point. Nor, despite its ostensibly left-wing tendencies, need one care that it bears a disconcerting resemblance to the spewings of Patrick Buchanan. Rather, what hurts The Golden Age, what hurts it irremediably, is that Vidal seems more engaged by demonstrating his thesis than by concerning himself with such mundane matters as his plot, or his characters, or the emotional truth of the experiences he visits upon those characters. The preponderance of his energy goes elsewhere: He wants to explain a chaotic century rather than make fiction. As if fiction is a relatively frivolous sort of endeavor, trivial by comparison with the profound business of pontificating about large questions.

More than one writer has come to grief on these shoals. Indeed, another novelist comes to mind, one who had written highly praised fiction but then turned his back on the practice in order to spend his old age instructing people how to live according to Christ's teachings. He thought it was an inestimably more important use of his time and his talent than creating what he came to regard, dismissively, as mere amusements. Mere amusements like War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Till tomorrow,
Erik

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

from: Erik Tarloff

Seating Chart

Posted Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2000, at 5:26 PM ET

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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.

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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

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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'?"