A beguiling conclusion to an invaluable extended work. If Vidal's novels were used as texts, we'd all be American History...
Though its narrative temperature remains dangerously low, entertainment value is dependably high in this seventh and last of Vidal's delectable Novels of Empire.
The Golden Age follows chronologically Washington, D.C. (1968), and is also closely related to Vidal's Empire, Hollywood, and even (his best novel) Burr. It begins in 1939, when fears of inevitable American involvement in another European war increase the likelihood that incumbent President Franklin Roosevelt's "amoral mastery of world politics" will guarantee him an unprecedented third term. Vidal then summarizes (often rather tediously) the watershed domestic and international political events of the subsequent 15 years, as observed and discussed by a colorful gallery of interconnected fictional characters and historical figures. Former film actress and newspaper publisher Caroline Sanford (Vidal's Clare Booth Luce) manipulates the levels of power (and the several men still under her spell) expertly. FDR charms and deceives all who wander within his orbit. His successor, Harry Truman, shows the steel beneath his unprepossessing exterior. And Caroline's nephew Peter Sanford bridges the worlds of Washington and Hollywood his aunt had conquered, as founder and co-editor of the liberal magazine The American Idea. Prominent cameo appearances are made by such luminaries as FDR's nonpareil advisor Harry Hopkins, William Randolph Hearst, the young Gore Vidal (already, in his 20s, a Washington insider), an imposingly resourceful Eleanor Roosevelt, and underrated novelist Dawn Powell (who memorably disses her rather better-known contemporary thus: "Ernest writes pidgin English, the way he thinks real men talk and write, consummate sissy that he is"). It's all very talky, and creaks and groans noticeably whenever Vidal makes labored connections to earlier books in the series. Still, the talk is wonderfully witty and informed—and climaxes magnificently in a surprise metafictional ending, which takes place on the recent final New Year's Eve of the past century.
A beguiling conclusion to an invaluable extended work. If Vidal's novels were used as texts, we'd all be American History majors.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-50075-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
A bold but flawed debut novel.
There’s a mystery, a coming-of-age, abundant melodrama and even more abundant medical lore in this idiosyncratic first novel from a doctor best known for the memoir My Own Country (1994).
The nun is struggling to give birth in the hospital. The surgeon (is he also the father?) dithers. The late-arriving OB-GYN takes charge, losing the mother but saving her babies, identical twins. We are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1954. The Indian nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a trained nurse who had met the British surgeon Thomas Stone on a sea voyage ministering to passengers dying of typhus. She then served as his assistant for seven years. The emotionally repressed Stone never declared his love for her; had they really done the deed? After the delivery, Stone rejects the babies and leaves Ethiopia. This is good news for Hema (Dr. Hemalatha, the Indian gynecologist), who becomes their surrogate mother and names them Shiva and Marion. When Shiva stops breathing, Dr. Ghosh (another Indian) diagnoses his apnea; again, a medical emergency throws two characters together. Ghosh and Hema marry and make a happy family of four. Marion eventually emerges as narrator. “Where but in medicine,” he asks, “might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained?” The question is key, revealing Verghese’s intent: a family saga in the context of medicine. The ambition is laudable, but too often accounts of operations—a bowel obstruction here, a vasectomy there—overwhelm the narrative. Characterization suffers. The boys’ Ethiopian identity goes unexplored. Shiva is an enigma, though it’s no surprise he’ll have a medical career, like his brother, though far less orthodox. They become estranged over a girl, and eventually Marion leaves for America and an internship in the Bronx (the final, most suspenseful section). Once again a medical emergency defines the characters, though they are not large enough to fill the positively operatic roles Verghese has ordained for them.
A bold but flawed debut novel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-41449-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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