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Rating: 
Summary: Duluth is a wickedly funny book.
Review: Duluth, a wickedly funny satire by Gore Vidal, is the funniest novel I have ever read. It is a satire of 1980's Reagan-era America, and of the rich in particular. However, the reader should be advised that it is not going to make sense, and one should, like I did, just give up on figuring it out, and go along for the ride that Vidal takes us on. It may be absurd, but it is great fun, and I heartily recommend Duluth to anyone looking for a funny novel written in great style.
Rating:
Summary: Caustic...dizzying...hilarious.... Brilliant
Review: There is a tremendous amount of violence in this book; the kind of subversively funny violence that makes it a bridge from the violence of Bugs Bunny cartoons of the 1940s to Quentin Tarantino's PULP FICTION and KILL BILL today. And that violence, profoundly enough, like its antecedents and descendents, is not in the plot; it's in the construction, deconstruction and delivery of each line in the novel as a whole. It is that kind of violence that is subversive enough in how it is delivered, in terms of context and irony, that makes this book so important, and, ulitmately, hilarious.Only someone as well associated with the barbaric hypocrisy of the bourgeousie in American society like the Master Gore Vidal could write a book that reveals it to such maddening detail with such incredible humor. And yet, like an ADD child gone too long without his pills or a self-loathing genius comedian riffing while high on drugs, Vidal refuses to stop there. He begins to contemptuously deconstruct the very art form that is the novel to rip from it the very selfsame pretensions of artistic superiority inherent in it via its destruction--as it has existed for mainly the middle to upper middle classes in the first place. He makes his point that the novel is essentially dead, replaced with movies and the television hour drama as a vehicle for storytelling in the modern world; yet he does it while going off Hollywood television culture, in the context of his many stories. He even goes off on the very self-conscious postmodernistic style of novel writing after Pynchon, while staying true to the character and story development of about six or seven different absurd plots that form the bedrock of this sick but oh so American town named Duluth. Imagine a small, racist, politically corrupt town in the mid West with UFOs, Aztec terrorists who speak like Shakespearean heroes when their Spanish colloquialisms are translated, and people who, when they die, get reincarnated into characters on a television soap opera made about the town itself...and you have about HALF of what is going on in this incredibly silly and profoundly beautiful novel. Gore Vidal is to Mark Twain what John Coltrane is to Charlie Parker. Read this novel, and see what I mean. Brilliant.
Rating:
Summary: A book to be read
Review: This book is Ha-Ha funny and Hmmmm interesting all at the same time. It is a satire, among many other things. Read it and read it again, and then once more, then put it aside for a few years, then read it again. You'll thank yourself for doing so.
Rating:
Summary: A book to be read
Review: This book is Ha-Ha funny and Hmmmm interesting all at the same time. It is a satire, among many other things. Read it and read it again, and then once more, then put it aside for a few years, then read it again. You'll thank yourself for doing so.
Rating: 
Summary: weak beer
Review: To judge by one of his responses to the Proust Questionnaire published in Vanity Fair, Vidal considers this peculiar little volume his chef-d'oeuvre. One can only assume this is another example of the well-documented phenomenon of a parent reserving his fiercest love for his sickliest child. Although written in the nondemanding (for authors and readers alike) turn-the-squares'-cliches-against-them style of his celebrated poleminc-cum-sex-comedy "Myra Breckenridge", "Duluth" generally fails to sting or tittilate. Consider this representative (you'll have to take my word for it) sample of the book's approach, taken from its opening pages: ---------- "I believe, Edna, that a Negro is being lynched." "You'll love Duluth. I can tell." Edna revs up her jalopy's motor. "We have excellent race relations here, as you can see. And numerous nouvelle cuisine restaurants." ------------ Oh, that vile bourgeois complacency! I can just picture Vidal's Washington-elite nostrils twitching with contempt as he composes at the writing desk in his palazzo in Ravello, Italy. Only one can't help but wonder: is it racism that excites his disgust or just the stench of the middle class?
Rating: 
Summary: Funny, sophomoric, vulgar, subversive!
Review: Vidal was an old man when he wrote this, but he writes like a college sophomore out to have a great deal of fun. Lots of laughs, silliness, attacks on the right wing. A quick read and a fun one. Stay away if you are easily offended by sexual humor.
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