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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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The World According to Gore
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Sep 26, 2009 01:25am |
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| Category | Review |
| Author | Paul Gray |
| Media | Weekly News Magazine - TIME Magazine |
| News Date | Sunday, September 17, 2000 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | 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 the author's career-long penchant for ironies will in no way be surprised to hear that the new book is called The Golden Age.
"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, when Peter Sanford, overweight and 77, visits the Italian villa of his old friend Gore Vidal to tape a television program of shared musings under the direction of a young man named A. B. Decker, a descendant of Aaron Burr. |
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