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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Books: The Veneer of the Gilded Age
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Sep 26, 2009 01:08am |
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| Category | Review |
| Author | Paul Gray |
| Media | Weekly News Magazine - TIME Magazine |
| News Date | Monday, June 22, 1987 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Empire by Gore Vidal; Random House; 486 pages; $22.50
This novel is the fifth installment of a burgeoning saga that might be called "The U.S. According to Gore." Vidal's ambitious retelling and revamping of American history began on a modest scale with Washington, D.C. (1967), a novel set in the middle of this century that mixed real and fictional people in a struggle for the nation's soul. Then came Burr (1973), a witty revisionist look at the Founding Fathers, as recorded by Aaron Burr's amanuensis and illegitimate son Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler. In 1876 (1976), an older Schuyler returned home after years of self-imposed exile to witness both the theft of a presidential election and his daughter's cynical campaign to land a rich American husband. Lincoln (1984) was a lumbering but best- selling attempt to portray the legendary President through the eyes of three associates during the war-torn White House years.
Empire can be understood with no knowledge of the four novels that precede it, but a number of nuances will be missed in the process. Vidal's version of American society from 1898 to 1906 comes heavily cross-referenced not only to the historical past but to his other books. For example, the fictional heroine, Caroline Sanford, is Charles Schuyler's granddaughter and thus linked to Burr and 1876; she has an affair with an equally fictional Congressman named James Burden Day, who will one day seek the presidency in Washington, D.C. |
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