Word: burrs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gore Vidal can leave Benedict Arnold alone, but he can not restrain himself from trying to polish the tarnished reputation of his maternal ancestor Burr. He does not try to turn Burr into a hero, but he does attempt to make him into something less two dimensional than the flip side of a coin. For this day and age, Vidal's attempt constitutes a rehabilitation of Burr. No one tries to write Parson Weems-type historical fiction anymore: larger-than-life heroes like Washington are no longer very appealing. To turn a villian into a hero of today's world...
...there is any point in rehabilitating Burr this book does not make it, but since Burr is a historical novel rather than a learned defense of an ex-vice president of the United States, its failure in interpreting the period is incidental. Burr remains what he was--Revolutionary War hero, New York lawyer, vice president, Alexander Hamilton's murderer, Western adventurer, exile, and New York lawyer again. Burr concentrates on the public events in Burr's life--making numerous and obligatory bows toward his home life, but never really exploring it with the exception of one grotesque incident late...
...BURR WAS ONE of the most intriguing early American politicians. Vidal takes the material at hand and succeeds in turning out a coherent, internally consistent narrative. He does so using an almost disjointed technique--developing the story of Burr's career simultaneously through "memoirs" attributed to Burr and through "research" supposedly conducted by Charles Schuyler, a young journalist and friend of Burr...
...disjointed narrative has its advantages. Schuyler's research is used to fill in Burr's background, to reveal little tidbits of bastardy that Burr could not plausibly put in his memoirs. More importantly, by purporting to include portions of Burr's own memoirs, Vidal can ascribe motives to Burr's activities throughout the man's public career...
Vidal claims to find this freedom to ascribe motives very important, so important that it is itself responsible for his chosing to write a historical novel rather than a history. In an After-word he maintains that the novelist can ascribe motives to historical figures such as Burr, while historians, insofar as they are scrupulous, must refrain from doing...