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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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The Duluth We Deserve?
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Sep 27, 2009 05:14pm |
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| Category | Review |
| Author | George Stade |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Times |
| News Date | Sunday, June 5, 1983 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Gore Vidal has long nursed the satisfactions and grievances of being a man on the margin, a writer always "entirely out of fashion." That phrase comes from an essay of the late 60's, around the time that Mr. Vidal published three best sellers in a row. He had already written successful scripts for television, the movies and Broadway. Clearly, he is not so far on the fringe as to be out of touch with the center. In the way of people with Puritans in their closet, American readers have rewarded Mr. Vidal for the scorn he has heaped on them. "We have created a hell and call it the American Way of Life," he has written, although reading Mr. Vidal's essays and novels have become a part of it.
He has himself provided something of an explanation for this paradox. In an essay on John O'Hara, another immensely popular writer with an aggrieved sense of neglect, Mr. Vidal noted that "those writers who are the most popular are the ones who share the largest number of common assumptions with their audience." Mr. Vidal and his following, I would guess, share a sense of exclusion from the center, a grievance against the American way of life--which they nevertheless constitute. In any case, the middle American way of life is the subject of Duluth, a novel set in a city you will not find on any map.
The city of Duluth in Duluth is bounded on one side by picturesque Mexico. On a clear day you can see the Pacific Ocean, 20 miles to the north. On a clear night you can see the "lights of the aurora borealis fill the entire southern sky like the long cold finger of some metaphor." By the palm trees lining the shore of Lake Erie, near the mouth of the Colorado River, is the black ghetto. Along "ethnic Kennedy Avenue," at the edge of the desert, is Little Yucatan, a barrio populated by illegal aliens from Mexico. |
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