Word: vidal
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Near the conclusion of Gore Vidal's "Washington, D.C." (1967), a political thriller spanning the years 1937-52, the novel's hero, Peter Sanford, expresses irritable despair at the human condition as he has observed it in his treacherous hometown: "There was never a golden age. There will never be a golden age and it is sheer romance to think we can ever be other than what we are now." Now, 33 years later, Sanford pops up again as the protagonist of another Vidal novel, set in the same place and roughly the same time, and readers familiar with...
...Irony is unAmerican," a character in The Golden Age (Doubleday; 467 pages; $27.50) warns Sanford, and that comment is, of course, intended ironically as well. But the novel completes a very American literary project that, for all its various humors, Vidal takes seriously indeed: a fictional history of the U.S. as portrayed through the conduct, mostly bad, of its elected leaders. This best-selling saga started with "Washington, D.C." and continued with "Burr" (1973), "1876" (1976), "Lincoln" (1984), "Empire" (1987) and "Hollywood" (1990). "The Golden Age" wraps up the long story and includes a flash-forward to earlier this year...
...writers like Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, John Updike and Gore Vidal know how transparent and boring they are in launching their bruised-ego slurs against others in their field? There is plenty of room on this planet for all great writers to reap their monetary and psychological rewards without resorting to such laughable tactics. DALE N. WICKLIFFE Phoenix, Ariz...
...Irving attacked Tom Wolfe as being unreadable. Wolfe responded by attacking Irving as being washed up as a novelist, along with Norman Mailer and John Updike, who had attacked Wolfe earlier. So it has always gone. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing." Gore Vidal on Capote: "He has made lying an art. A minor art." The novelist James Gould Cozzens, perhaps expressing sour grapes of wrath: "I cannot read 10 pages of Steinbeck without throwing...
...Innaurato jump full force into the whole of literature since the Book of Genesis. Durang has always been something of the Tom Stoppard of absurdist drama, but in The Idiots Karamazov he outdoes himself. Insert famous femme fatale Anas Nin, lover to the likes of Henry Miller, Gore Vidal and Salvador Dal, a few scenes from Eugene O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night, and references to everything from Macbeth to Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, and you have one of the most delightful literary travesties this side of Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead...