No wonder this caused a stir in 1948 when published, it’s pretty full on today. Vidal often talks about how ground breaking his novel was (I’ll take his word for it) in showing two "normal" American athletes enjoying a gay love affair, just before one goes off to sea. The other one is so struck by the experience he becomes obsessed with tracking down the other guy - well he is for a bit anyway, then he kind of drifts.
Which is the main problem for this novel for me. The main guy Jim starts out as someone you can relate to - unhappy home life, basically in love with someone who he's not sure likes him back - but when he drifts he becomes this passive nothing.
He's good looking and a tennis player and Vidal seems keen to show how superior he is to other homosexuals by not being as horny or desperate or whatever (like Vidal, Jim is not gay identifying despite being seemingly unable to have hetero experience -indeed you get the feeling he/Jim feel on a slightly higher plane for being so, which you know he shouldn't be since he is basically kept by two men).
Which OK is fair enough but it means this novel is hollow at its core - the other two main characters, the pompous gay movie star and the not-quite-a-really-good-writer author are both a lot more human and engaging (both are in love with suffering and their own misery), as is the middle aged drifter woman based on Anais Nin; Jim doesn't really act human until towards the end when he's reunited with the guy again.
The ending packs a bit of a punch - it was rewritten to change from a killing to a rape, which is still pretty full on. I haven't read the original version of this, just the revised one - surely the Hollywood section was redone after Vidal's experience there. If you think it’s odd someone was obsessed with a person they only spent one weekend of passion with, well that's how Vidal was with a teenager lover, so there you go.
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