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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Books: Shotgun Satire
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Sep 26, 2009 12:58am |
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| Category | Review |
| Author | R.Z. Sheppard |
| Media | Weekly News Magazine - TIME Magazine |
| News Date | Monday, June 13, 1983 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Duluth by Gore Vidal; Random House; 214 pages; $13.95
Gore Vidal's novels, plays and essays can be divided roughly into three areas of animosity. The first is the author's belief that Western civilization erred when it abandoned pagan humanism for the stern, heterosexual authority of the Judaeo-Christian patriarchy. See Julian, his 1964 novel about the apostate nephew of Constantino the Great. The second area that draws Vidal's scorn is American politics, which he dramatizes as a circus of opportunism and hypocrisy. See The Best Man; Washington, D.C.; Burr. The most freewheeling disdain is directed at popular culture, macho sexuality and social pretensions. See Myra Breckinridge; Myron...
And now, Duluth. The novel is a shotgun satire of, among other things, the modern literary racket, from assembly line romances to academic criticism. Take, for example, Vidal's mock theory of après poststructuralism: "Corollary to the relative fictive law of absolute uniqueness is the simultaneity effect, which is to fiction what Miriam Heisenberg's law is to physics. It means that any character can appear, simultaneously, in as many fictions as the random may require." This is meant to explain why characters who die in Duluth can reappear in a TV show of the same name or a romance novel by a Rosemary Klein Kantor. Duluth is dislocated along the Mexican border next to "the winding Colorado River that empties into palm-lined Lake Erie." |
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