This book has been wrongly positioned by the publisher as a hilarious romp, a work in the line of Vidal’s other romps such as "Kalki", "Duluth" and "Myra Breckenridge". However, the bleak cover picture indicates much more accurately the subject, tone and project of the work.
The protagonist is an old man fighting against loss of memory brought about by physical decay and in the process of writing his memoirs. This is a familiar trope for Gore Vidal. "Julian" (written when the author was 37), "Creation" (written when the author was 56), "Kalki", (written when the author was 53) all feature an old man in a dry month. This stance, surprising in a comparatively young author, allows Vidal to exercise his judgment over his own time with some of the authority of a longer historical perspective, illuminating the follies of his and our age by placing them into a distant past. At the same time it is also perhaps a disguise adopted by an outsider: the marginal position in society of extreme old age masking and mirroring the sexual outsider, the man of above average intelligence, and the holder of unconventional values. (Come to think of it, sexual marginalisation disguised as old age is not an uncommon trope in other ‘gay’ writers too. Consider this opening sentence from Anthony Burgess’s marvelous "Earthly Powers", the fictional autobiography of an octogenarian homosexual light-musical composer and popular novelist: "It was the afternoon of my 80th birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." And then of course there’s Proust, and Yourcenar’s Hadrian.)...

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http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2006/0... ( )