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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Sep 27, 2009 04:52pm |
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| Category | Review |
| Author | Christopher Lehmann-Haupt |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Times |
| News Date | Thursday, October 25, 1973 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | How diabolically well-timed is the appearance of Gore Vidal's latest novel, Burr; just at this most disillusioning moment in American history when all the old verities are beginning to seem hollow, Mr. Vidal gives us an interpretation of our early history that says in effect that all the old verities were never much to begin with. And what a tour de force is the result! How close Mr. Vidal has managed to stick to the actual historical record--only two of his characters are invented (one is Charles Schuyler, a law clerk and aspiring journalist who is the primary narrator of Burr, and whom Mr. Vidal identifies in his Afterword as "based roughly on the obscure novelist Charles Burdett"; the other is one William de la Touche Clancey, a "Tory sodomite" with a tongue that "darts in and out of his mouth like a lizard's catching flies," who, Mr. Vidal assures us, "could, obviously, be based on no one at all"); as for the actual historical figures who appear in the novel--only in three minor cases are they not "in the right places, on the right dates, doing what the actually did"; and the conversations, though partly made up, always reflect the recorded views of the speakers. Yet for all this documentary authenticity, how alive and immediate everything seems!
What a clever piece of machinery is Mr. Vidal's complicated plot! By setting the present- tense of his story in the 1830's and having Aaron Burr recall in his lively old age his memories of the Revolutionary War, the early history of the Republic, and his famous contests with Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson (as if these mythic events had happened only yesterday)--what a telescoping of the legendary past Mr. Vidal achieves, and what leverage it gives him to tear that past to tatters. |
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