The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 (Vintage International) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I have never been able to read, much less appreciate, however, his fiction. No doubt the failure is mine. Yet I think it indisputable that Vidal is a much better essayist than he is a novelist. In this, his latest collection--effectively just a continuation of his United States: Essays 1952-1992 (1993), a massive volume of 1,278 pages, also jacketed ironically in red, white and blue--Vidal continues his unrelenting attack on all things pretentious, pompous, political and/or simply within reach.

He can be balanced (as in "Edmund Wilson: Nineteenth-Century Man," the first essay), slighting with faint praise ("The Romance of Sinclair Lewis" p. 46), adoring ("Sinatra" p. 149), brutal (as in "Reply to a Critic" p. 79), and devastatingly funny, particularly when addressing the hijinks of American pols as in his essays on FDR, Truman, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Al Gore, etc. He is at his best when defending the constitution, human rights, freedom, and democracy against its enemies as in "Shredding the Bill of Rights," p. 397, "A Letter to Be Delivered," p. 436, and "Japanese Intentions in the Second World War," p. 457, not to mention perhaps a hundred other essays here and elsewhere. His main tactic is a cynical sarcasm laced with selected facts from his prodigious memory. He can be ironic and surgically subtle, but he is not above plain old ridicule. His style is accomplished and erudite without being stuffy. His treatment is popular but without any concessions to the verbally challenged.

But Gore Vidal (the "Gore" is from his mother's side of the family, the same family that spawned Al Gore) is also a classicist, thoroughly at home in Roman and Greek literature, and especially in Greek culture. He is an expert on literature and politics, as knowledgeable as any academic and as cosmopolitan and worldly as any ambassador. It is one of the ironies of Vidal's life, he being a staunch foe of what he has always seen as the frivolity of "bookchat" and its best-seller mentality, that he became with the historical novels he started writing in the sixties, a best-selling author himself, and a darling of the bookchat set. Indeed, Gore Vidal is an ironic man: an American aristocrat who would disown his class and embrace the hoi-polloi while keeping his tie pin firmly in place.

I was trying to see how his style has changed over the years, reading some of his essays from the fifties and sixties, and then this volume of 48 essays from the last decade. I must say that he is just as opinionated, assertive and eloquent as ever. I think he more carefully dotted his i's and crossed his t's in the old days, so that his sentences were perhaps a little more architectural, while today he is more relaxed and straight-forward. One might say, nowadays he just lets it fly.

In short, this collection is a splendid, energetic and thoroughly enjoyable romp through Americana land courtesy of one of our great tour masters. Did I say that if Gore Vidal didn't exist, we would have to invent him? Certainly America's twentieth century would not be the same without him.