Over at Thought Catalog, the inimitable Mark Dery presents an epic appreciation for the late Gore Vidal.
His perennial subject was the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and his commentaries on it constituted one long poison-pen elegy for American democracy, delivered with that patented blend of amused hauteur and oracular self-assurance. The small, what-fools-these-mortals-be smile he managed at the decline of Our Fair Republic (for him, it had been declining from the day it was founded) made mock of any dreams of social justice we might entertain.
Little surprise, then, that he wasn’t to everyone’s taste. In “Mr. Gore: Unpatriotic Vidal” (The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America), Martin Amis found his brick-thick novels hard going, took a dim view of his militant heterophobia (Vidal was bisexual), marveled at the virulence of his anti-Americanism, and raised a wry eyebrow at his pose, on the page, as “the only grown-up in America,” his tone “that of a super evolved stellar sage gazing down on the globe in pitying hilarity.” (Amis did concede, however, that Vidal was “probably” — I can just see the Cicero of the Small Screen pursing his lips at the weasel word — “the cleverest book-reviewer in the world.”)
“The Last Roman: What Gore Vidal Taught Us”