His Own Terms

[I'm in the home stretch of house-sitting for Boss-Man on Potrero Hill. When you don't have it, cable television (and he's sprung for every channel Comcast has available) is absurdly soft-center-satisfying. Except to walk the Dog-Monster Hal and get coffee, I didn't leave the house yesterday, and much of that time was spent in front of the idiot box. I won't tell you what I watched (except for finally getting thru the marvelous I Heart Huckabees in one sitting), but you'd only be somewhat appalled.]

[I also finished Gore Vidal's second set of memoirs, Point-to-Point Navigation. Hard-cover isn't generally in my budget, but I made an exception for Oh.My.Gore. Someone else acquired it as well, and elicited this unasked-for mini-review:]

[The verdict? My Gore is showing his age. For those of us who know Palimpsest like Ted Haggard knows Leviticus, Point-to-Point Navigation is a disappointment. At this point, Vidal's style and themes feel like a home I love to revisit, but I know there are whole wings in this house that I've yet to tour, and he's not in the mood to take me there.]

[Vidal spends half the book rehashing the high points of the earlier memoir, leaving out, mostly, the young love story that was the heart of that book. I found myself quoting whole passages as I was reading them. Clearly, he thinks the first half of his life is the more interesting one (that may be a universal feeling), but we all know that he did some pretty interesting stuff after the mid-60s (where Palimpsest left off), and we get to hear very little about what he remembers about, for example, the debates with William F. Buckley, his thoughts on his wonderful Narratives of Empire (especially the success he had with Burr and Lincoln), his adventures negotiating the Sexual Revolution as an early insurgent, and his late acting career.]

[The rest of the book feels like going through the motions. His writing on the vast right-wing conspiracy is muddled if accurate. We get a little more about his run for the Senate in 1982. He writes a nice piece on Johnny Carson. The most touching passages come in the middle, when he writes about his partner's illness and death. In a way he never did in Palimpsest with regard to Jimmie Trimble, Vidal finally shows us what maybe some of us who only know him through his writing doubted from time to time was actually there: a man without any masks left, absolutely destroyed by the loss of the man he loved.]

[This is a bit like a circus audience throwing tomatoes because it paid to see a performance the performer, under no obligation to me or anyone, doesn't feel up to giving. I guess I was hoping naively for a sequel to Palimpsest, done exactly in its style. I'm sure I'll reread this book, and maybe I'll fit myself into its shape so I can enjoy it on its own terms.]

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