The Golden Age

Rating:
Summary: Gore Vidal's homecoming
Review: Having been a fan of Gore Vidal for 30 years, it's sad to report that gossip has finally overtaken literary ambition. I confess: Vidal is a literary hero of mine, along with Scott Fitzgerald and Elmore Leonard, so I take no pleasure in this at all. But unfortunately, Gore has finally subsumed literary integrity to personal memoir.

Burr and 1876 remain his best novels (with Julian and Messiah not far behind) because the plot drives the books along even as the gossip intrigues and entertains you. In The Golden Age, as in Hollywood and Lincoln, the stories of the rich and famous that we don't (or do) want to hear begin to take centre stage.

Gore has always had his finger on the pulse of American politics - as a Brit, my understanding of the American psyche, for better or worse, has been formed by his writing (and latterly by Michael Moore, from a different sphere, and your satirical crime writers like Carl Hiassen and Laurence Shames) - and it's almost as if the later books have been attempts to recapitulate stuff that he's been writing for the last forty years or so.

The sad fact is, and what makes him so valuable, is that I have the sense that - as someone said - those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it, and Gore's notion that the rise and fall of the Roman empire is recapitulated in American history is something that needs to be repeated ad nauseam for a young audience who can't find their [butt] without a roadmap.

I'm sorry this is a confused review. I love Gore Vidal and would have several of his essays and novels engraved on my eyeballs as I venture across the river Styx. But latterly (except for in Palimpsest) the need to publish seems to have outweighed the need to consider what was being published, and in what form. So for me Gore remains one of the foundation writers of the last forty years - but if you're going to read anything (especially in these Bush/Gore days) read 1876 - it was all foretold. (And incidentally, if you're worried about the rise of fundamentalism etc., read Messiah. What a treat you have in store.)

Rating:
Summary: History and Fiction-Excellent!
Review: Having read all of the books in this series, I found this one to be my favorite. Perhaps because some of the era covered is part of my era; it brought the reality of politics to the forefront with drama and excitement. An excellent read for both fiction and history buffs! Gore Vidal fans will not be able to put this one down.

Rating:
Summary: an unfocused and disappointing final volume
Review: Having savored Vidal's irreverent, sardonic interpretations of various eras in Americna History I had always hoped that he would fill the void with a "final" volume about the pre and post World War II era. He has proved the ability to be more than just iconoclastic and shocking, however, as evidenced by the sound scholarship and sympathetic representation of the era in his novel "Lincoln". Therefore, I was pleased and excited when I learned that this work was coming out and I looked forward to Vidal's interpretation of this rich and fascinating period. It is an understatement, however, to say that I found this effort disappointing. I think the author forfeited the opportunity to effectively interpret an era about which his previous readers would particularly value his perspective.

Vidal has a distinctive viewpoint in terms of nostaglia for the days when the United States was still a republic, and offers ongoing, valid, and entertaining (albeit, often also depressing) criticism of the nation's transformation to an empire. While perhaps obvious, I anticipated Vidal fully exploring the extent to which this became true during the World War II era. However, it seems as if he's run out of steam and was too tired, or jaded, to bother in this work.

He does offer interesting and characteristically gossipy passages about the Roosevelts and some members of that administration. Additionally, he offers some interesting insights about Truman (though most are predictable). However, he entirely bypasses the war itself, and most of the McCarthy era, concluding with a surrealistic ending at the time of the millenium in which he inserts himself. Not only does the end seem a nonsequitur, it comes across as a vain self indulgence.

Based upon my established admiration for Vidal, finishing the book I felt badly for him and found myself wishing that this hadn't been written. It is certainly not in keeping with the quality of his previous work.

Rating:
Summary: Terribly Disappointed!Waste of Time and Money.
Review: I have always enjoyed Gore Vidal's work and consider "Burr" and "Lincoln" in the top 100 of informative and entertaining books that I have read over the last 40 years. Alas, not "The Golden Age". The premise of the book and the reviews that I had read encouraged me to order the book as soon as it was released. When the package from Amazon.com arrived -I started reading the book immediately. My reactions to it are as follows: 1. Vidal's characters assert that the Attack on Pearl Harbor was the result of careful and mischievous machinations of FDR in getting us into World War 2. Even if that were true - which is the subject matter for many authors and historians over the last 50+ years - are we to believe that the war with the Japanese and the German Nazi's was not a justifiable crusade into exterminating that source of genocidal fascist evil? 2. The characterizations of the main characters are extremely boring. One simply does not care what happens to them - they are intellectual and social elitists that are incredibly trite and have superfluous natures. 3. The characterization of Harry Hopkins as some sort of skillful yet tired and and ill do-gooder leads one to believe that Gore has never heard of the Venona Papers which clearly ascertain Mr. Hopkins as a Soviet agent. 4. Gore says that the US violated the Yalta Agreement and if we had just lived up to our part of that agreement - the cold war might not have happened. He has never read the works of Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Lenin. In addition he feels that the American Communist party were victims of a Salem Witch trial - Again Gore shows his complete ignorance of the material in the Venona papers and the testimony of Whittaker Chambers concerning the "fifth column" activities of the Communist Party in the US. 5. There are many other erroneous Vidalian concepts in the book BUT if he had written them in his former incisive - humorous - interesting style - one could enjoy the book. Again - this is not the case - The worst part of the book is that it is so poorly written - boring conversations - boring characterizations- illogical plot development - inane conclusions. Not only a waste of money but more importantly a waste of time.

Rating:
Summary: vidal's gossipy story
Review: I have enjoyed several of Vidal's historical novels including Lincoln. I've also enjoyed some of his other novels. This book, however was much too full of gossip, most of it about people that I couldn't care about. The characterizations of people like FDR were interesting (by the way, I can't beleive that Harry Hopkins was a Soviet agent). Also, there has been a great deal of criticism of Vidal's thesis that FDR knew of the Pearl Harbor attack and that Truman dropped the bomb on the Japanese in spite of their suits for peace. We will most likely never know the truth about these events (like JFK's murder)but his interpretation is just as valid given the facts that are known as anyone else's.

Rating:
Summary: An Infuriating, but entertaining book
Review: I must confess I enjoyed this book. It has some marvelous moments about the dearly departed. Aside from Franklin and Eleanor (who at one point refers to her husband as a "fat ass") there is William Randolph Hearst and a whole hoard of Hollywood types. The Sanfords Kate and Blaise are back with their families and hangers on as well. This is a much better book than Washington DC which was meant to be the conclusion of Vidal's series. I would have thought that Vidal might have "pulled a Henry James" and revised Washington DC so that it is the kind of book that it might have been had not so many of the people mentioned in it required "the names to have been changed to protect the guilty."

While there is a great deal of good in this book, I found conspiracy theories tiresome. The evils of Harry Truman (who also gets a walk on here) are aired (he is the "mad haberdasser" There is also FDR's ability, all by himself to spin a web so that the "hapless" (not the term I would expect most veterans of WWII would describe them) Japanese will blunder into war with the US and thereby enable us to have rich spoils in Asia. I think ultimately these rants, while sometimes entertaining will do Vidal's reputation little good.

Rating:
Summary: An Infuriating, but entertaining book
Review: I must confess I enjoyed this book. It has some marvelous moments about the dearly departed. Aside from Franklin and Eleanor (who at one point refers to her husband as a "fat ass") there is William Randolph Hearst and a whole hoard of Hollywood types. The Sanfords Kate and Blaise are back with their families and hangers on as well. This is a much better book than Washington DC which was meant to be the conclusion of Vidal's series. I would have thought that Vidal might have "pulled a Henry James" and revised Washington DC so that it is the kind of book that it might have been had not so many of the people mentioned in it required "the names to have been changed to protect the guilty."

While there is a great deal of good in this book, I found conspiracy theories tiresome. The evils of Harry Truman (who also gets a walk on here) are aired (he is the "mad haberdasser" There is also FDR's ability, all by himself to spin a web so that the "hapless" (not the term I would expect most veterans of WWII would describe them) Japanese will blunder into war with the US and thereby enable us to have rich spoils in Asia. I think ultimately these rants, while sometimes entertaining will do Vidal's reputation little good.

Rating:
Summary: more an argument, less a novel
Review: I must confess that I feel ambivalent about this book. I greatly admire the other volumes of the series, not only for their value as iconoclastic evocations of American history, but as novels in themselves with vibrant and fascinating characters. Vidal is, simply put, one of America's greatest living artists. His voice is unique and unmistakable. In other volumes, his personal views are hidden and cryptic, which is great fun as the reader is kept guessing. Alas, in this one, I found his views to be baldly plain and that the characters were used as vehicles to serve these ideas. This terribly weakens its value as a work of art. Instead, it often reads like one of his essays.

In my reading, Vidal is arguing that FDR saw WWII as the only way to stay in power, a life-saving decision as there was nothing else of intimate value in his life. To do so, he took a giant step in creating the "national security state," which upon his death in office an unwitting Truman completed. Now in my view, this is a simplistic reading of a bewilderingly complex period, a watershed if you will.

Nonetheless, Vidal succeeded in getting me to question my assumptions, and that I think is of the greatest value and the unique contribution that an historical novel can relate. That saved the reading experience for me, which was more wooden than Vidal's previous accomplishments. Perhaps it is Vidal's talent that got him to create this as a crucial moment in American foreign policy, in which our involvement in such places as Irak are under scrutiny and our ideals are distrusted by the very allies that are supposed to benefit from them. It is an age of the most profound disillusionment and Vidal is providing the art that reflects this period.

Finally, the swansong machinations of the Sanfords are wonderful to follow. Also, the fate of Clay - the JFK-like villain of "Washington, DC" - is also advanced. It is a fitting conclusion to one of the great cycles of novels of this age. There are, of course, many hilarious moments in which the manners of the ruling class are dissected and exposed for questioning. In his hands, their vanities are so human, and this is a good thing.

Warmly - and this time cerebrally - recommended.

Rating:
Summary: American History--Gore Style
Review: 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:
Summary: What am I missing?
Review: Some of Gore Vidal's work has entertained me a lot (Julian), but this book wasn't one of them. Maybe I'm just not sophisticated enough to ride with it. The guy is obviously a great writer, but I found 'Golden Age' to be just a string of gossipy dialogue sprinkled with some major historical facts, not enough of a plot to keep me hooked. If you like the kind of chatty Hollywood-style writing, you'll like it. If you like something more narrative, you probably won't.