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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Sep 27, 2009 05:05pm |
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| Category | Review |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Times |
| News Date | Sunday, December 21, 1980 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The idea behind this book is one of such obvious wit and utility that one can only marvel at the fact that no one seems to have tried it before--but people undoubtedly said the same thing about the invention of the wheel. Gore Vidal, who has been interviewed by just about every publication claiming some connection to literature during the past 20 years, has selected the choicer tidbits from many of the interviews and arranged them not in chronological order but according to subject matter.
Thus, instead of wading through a tedious sequence of separate interviews to get to the good stuff, we are treated to intelligible, discrete summaries of Mr. Vidal's views on sex (mixed), American higher education (negative), on book reviewers (negative raised to the tenth power) in the same sections--sometimes on the same page--questions from Mademoiselle in 1961 are followed by those from Fag Rag, the Paris Review and Newsweek in 1974.
The interviewers' questions, on every subject from homosexuality to "autobiographical" novels, reflect interests that are as constantly inconstant as those of a fashion writer interviewing a designer about hemlines. The unconventional organization of this book reveals the transitory nature of contemporary passions about what ought to be enduring questions of art, politics and morals.
Mr. Vidal, however, is consistent; he believes the same things in 1980 that he believed in 1960. And even when--or especially when--he is being suspicious or downright insulting, Mr. Vidal seems incapable of uttering a dull English sentence (especially after he has edited himself). There is a good idea of serious talk about writers and writing here. In their abrasiveness and consistent intelligence, these interviews reminded me of Philip Roth's Reading Myself and Others, and I frequently found myself comparing the two novelists' ideas. |
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