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Title: The Golden Age by Gore Vidal, Kathryn Walker, Anne Twomey, Robert Kessler ISBN: 0553502654 Publisher: Bantam Books-Audio Pub. Date: 19 September, 2000 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 12 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.95
Rating: 4
Summary: Golden Gore
Comment: "Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust." And so it is with Gore Vidal and his bright and shining fictional characters of "Washington, D.C." who conclude their lives in what Vidal considers the only war-free Golden Age 1945-1951.
"Golden Age" despite the increasing infirmities of the characters, is a lively book. I have a special place for Vidal; in spite of his monumental conceits, his brilliance sweeps one along. On the conceit front, he actually gives himself a cameo part noting that poor fictional Peter Sandford has gone to fat, but Vidal is imperially slim. I had to smile, as the real-life Vidal has always had a weight problem.
Most of the publicity on this book concerns whether FDR "knew" in advance of the attack on Pearl Harbor. There is a nicety here that the publicists overlook. Vidal maintains President Roosevelt "knew" there would be an attack in the Pacific, but not where. His best guess was the Philippines. To me, this is an important difference and casts a much more kindly light on FDR. Vidal's unusual take (negative) on Harry Truman is worth the price of the book. As always, Vidal is waspish with historical characters that do not meet with his approval. I vividly recall my shock at his unfavorable view of Thomas Jefferson in "Burr." He has satirist Dawn Powell, in a two-page monologue, doing a non-stop hilariously wicked take on Ernest Hemingway. I don't know if Vidal is quoting Powell direct or if we are hearing Vidal speaking through Powell, but whatever it is, one of them (or both) are masters of invective.
"Golden Age" is an entertaining and thoughtful read. The history is precise and the conclusions are compelling. If you like your history with a dash of wry, this is the book for you. Recommended.
Rating: 4
Summary: American History--Gore Style
Comment: In his historical novels, Gore Vidal brings the solemn marble statues of American history to brilliant life by letting them talk. And talk. His books are long, sometimes lacivious conversations, and his characters distinguish themselves -- sometimes extinguishing themselves to the reader-- through their own words.
For instance, in The Golden Age, a large helping of World War II era spilled beans, a young man at a New York party responds to the idea that America needs a new civilization to go with its new global ascendancy by saying, ''Do we really want a civilization?... We've done awfully well as the hayseeds of the Western world. Why spoil it?... No, we've got to stay dumb.''
Yes, that signature cynicism is uttered by the author himself, making a brief cameo. So if you won't find gore, you will find Gore in this 100 percent action free wartime novel, the seventh and last in the linked sequence of American history novels that begins chronologically with ''Burr'' (although Vidal wrote what's now volume 6, ''Washington, D.C.,'' way back in 1967) and adds up to a talkative masterpiece.
Also in captivity, among a mob of mid century American potentates, are Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, Cary Grant, and Tennessee Williams.
As usual, the conversation's good. Vidal's animated historical figures aren't farcically pompous, but they are, like Vidal himself, trenchant, sporadically wise, and routinely malicious. He delivers verbal stilettos to just about every eminent back that appears.
The more ominous conversations are about America's backing into the war and its lurching role in the postwar world. If you've been following the story through previous novels like ''Empire'' and ''Hollywood,'' you know the anti imperialist gospel according to Gore.
Here, Vidal's FDR sees involvement in the Nazi launched European war as a winnable shot at an American administered worldwide New Deal, and -- craftily and charmingly -- he goes for it mainly (in what has been the novel's most controversial assertion) by provoking the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. The global war produces, in Vidal's version, a new America that loses its republican innocence and becomes a Cold War garrison state.
In other words, we should have stayed dumb, or played dumb. One of Vidal's mostly marginal fictional characters, wandering in from the earlier novels, launches a magazine and declares, ''I intend to create... America's Golden Age.'' For Vidal, it was that brief parenthesis of national elation, between war and Cold War, that was a Golden Age, followed by fool's gold -- we're now stuck in a congested ''technological Calcutta'' of a planet.
Wherever you shelve its populist isolationist politics, ''The Golden Age'' works as a mordant evocation of historical personalities and turning points, and above all, as monumental past tense gossip.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not "Lincoln", but enjoyable.
Comment: "The Golden Age" is a not breathtaking work of historical fiction as Vidal's "Lincoln" was. "Lincoln" was a meditation of the political and moral genius of Abraham Lincoln. In awe of his subject, Vidal was able to resist his usual cynicism and didacticism. "The Golden Age" however, is marked by anecdote, innuendo, and gossip. This is because Vidal was a contemporary of the events described in the novel. Indeed, he himself appears as a character several times throughout the book. In a strange stylistic device, Vidal, the character / author, usurps the narrative function from his alter ego, Peter Sanford, in the last chapter of the book. Although Vidal's suspicions that the U.S. government strives to keep us in a state of perpetual crisis are a bit much, his views are somewhat entertaining from a narrative perspective. And who or what is the manipulative Clay Overby supposed to represent? America's innate prediliction to fascism? Or our society's penchant to become infatuated with surface beauty? "The Golden Age" will give you plenty to talk about and maybe that is Vidal's goal -- to get us to return to the lost art of intellectual discussion.
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Title: Washington, D.C: A Novel (The American Chronicle Series) by Gore Vidal ISBN: 0375708774 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Hollywood: A Novel of America in the 1920s (Vidal, Gore, American Chronicle.) by Gore Vidal ISBN: 0375708758 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Empire: A Novel (Vidal, Gore, American Chronicle.) by Gore Vidal ISBN: 037570874X Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: 1876 by Gore Vidal ISBN: 0375708723 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 15 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Burr: A Novel (The American Chronicle Series) by Gore Vidal ISBN: 0375708731 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 15 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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