Vidal is a good novelist, screenwriter and playwright, but is an essayist of genius. This is a top notch collection of pieces, helped by the fact he wasn't quite as angry in the early years so didn't crap on about FDR forcing us into WW2 or oil juntas as much.
There are pieces on commercial theatre (he defends Williams but gets stuck into Arthur Miller, which is a little unfair), novels, writing for television (a genre at which he was one of the top stars along with Serling and Chayefsky). He is particularly brilliant on novels, with some great pieces on Norman Mailer and John Dos Passos, novelists as "recorders"rather than people who actually imagine things, the fact Americans prefer their novelists to be doomed (very true).
Marvellous demolition of literary critics, especially some poor soul called Richard Gilman and a very funny review of a book on himself (he refers to himself as"Subject"). He is a bit wonkier on sex - a funny review of Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) he pokes fun of Doc Ruebens making sweeping unsupported statements (to which he says any decent professor would write in the margins "prove"), then goes on to make some himself (and in the copy of the book from the University of Qld library I have read someone wrote in the margins "prove" - very clever); you can't help thinking at times when he's going "hey we're all bisexual and you can be a man and muck around with another man and still get married" he's trying to increase his own constituency.
He also starts to froth a bit at the mouth when talking about his idea for an Authority to regulate the environment and dispense birth control - years before Gattaca (in which Vidal had a small role - I'd love to hear his thoughts on that film). But generally this is consistently brilliant -surely the best book reviewer ever?
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