The Golden Age

Rating:
Summary: Less-than-first-rate Vidal
Review: Gore Vidal is a national treasure and one of my favorite authors, but this is the most disappointing of his novels that I have read. The first hundred pages or so consist of Washington cocktail-party chatter circa 1940, and it doesn't get much better as it goes along. The characters seem oddly detached from the epochal events unfolding around them, and as a result the reader cares little about them. There is much to be said about the machinations of the ruling powers during the period covered in this book; perhaps a work of fiction, although based on fact, is not the proper forum to explore them, as master essayist Vidal must himself have known before finishing this dramatically unsatisfying work. Perhaps he needed the advance to pay the mortgage on his Italian villa? Authors have to eat, too.

Rating:
Summary: To Be Golden, An Age Must Have Its Gore
Review: Gore Vidal's "The Golden Age" is a magnificent book by our greatest living author and man of letters. As the capstone on his historical novelization of the rise and decline of the American Empire, it is a fitting end to a series which enlightens and entertains. For Vidal strips away the myth of America that neo-conservatism seeks at virtually all cost to perpetuate, be it the myth of a noble "Founding," the myth of a saintly and simple Abraham Lincoln, the myth of a noble empire bent on enlightening the world out of sheer altruism, the myth that we fought World War II because we were attacked without provocation, or the myth that our actions at the beginning of the Cold War were entirely in reaction to those of the Soviet Union.

This is Vidal's great theme. Over the course of his work, the main line of character development lies, not so much in Vidal's people, as in the country and then the nation itself. Vidal grew up surrounded by the men who became the ghosts that haunt our history; which is why, I suppose, that the end of this book is so fitting and so beautiful a finale to what has become a monumental work.

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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.