One is tempted to judge the effort by the standard Dr.
Whatever its cause, Vidal's new daring is welcome, and his abilities in most of the technical prerequisites of fiction writing are not negligible. But, if admirable is not the word, there is surely something wondrous in the audacity of the creator of Myra Breckenridge taking on the job of depicting the two presidencies of Lincoln.
To say Gore Vidal's recent novel fails nobly may go too far. So trivial are the projects today's novelists set themselves that producing a noble failure in any large-scale political conception would raise the stakes of current American literature. Lincoln's loving but mentally decomposing wife, his view from the White House on slavery and America's bloodiest war, and his own, fierce personal ambition: all are portrayed with a vibrancy and an urgency that almost belies what they have now become ? history itself.A review of Lincoln : A novel, by Gore Vidalįirst Citizen: You have deserved nobly of your country and you have not deserved nobly. Yet gradually Lincoln the towering leader of deep vision emerges in a Washington engulfed by fear, greed and the horrors of the Civil War.
People in this novel are not averse to turning up, getting drunk, and regaling the reader with details of Lincoln's whoring activities and his seemingly inexhaustible supply of folksy stories. Observed alternately by his loved ones, his rivals and his future assassins, Lincoln at first appears as an inept and naive backwoods lawyer. Yet in this brilliantly realised study of Abraham Lincoln, he paints a surprising and near-heroic picture of the man who led America through four of the most divisive and dangerous years of the nation's history. In the hazardous fictional terrain of his historical novels, Gore Vidal is never especially kind to American history in general, or to its icons in particular.
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