After reading Myra Breckinridge I couldn't look at my passions with the same sort of satisfaction after being infused by Vidal's challenge to established normalcy.
He doesn't waste any time introducing us to his philosophical, dedicated diary-writing main character Myra Breckinridge.
Myra is a determined transsexual with an edge of determined power. Vidal draws Myra from the masses and sets her aside with an assumed background that stretches the bounds of possibility. This unconventional collection of presupposed events goes along with Vidal's overall intention to shock.
Vidal utilizes the personal setting of a diary to present his readers with a more complete understanding of the workings of an up-and-coming person living a lifestyle with freewill and self-asserted power.
Vidal's connections between shockingly different human lives and the commonplace suburban plain works well in this novel. He does not overlook the importance of love, acceptance, and stability to remain sane.
With these emotions included, the reader is allowed to remain attached with the character alongside a fascination with her seemingly educated obscenity. For this, Vidal can be commendable in his efforts.
As far as shock factor, this book is not for your grandma. Vidal himself admits Myra Breckinridge was "pretty far out" by the standards of the time, though these days, fairly mild.
However, you feel receptive after reading it and not only because the sex scenes are described with little reservations, but also because Myra forever remains informed and thus justifiably assertive.
The theories of power in all human existence are intertwined by the daily life of Myra that can be partially or wholly applied to any who read this fictional transgender's story.
"I existed totally" were Myra's words when referring to her own choice of lifestyle, but when this comment was written, Vidal was not done with her story.
Just as the rest of the book finds room to wander to and fro between acceptable and eccentric, the plot begins typical and predictable among its own established bounds but by the end you've been thrown a quick curveball. It either leaves you satisfied with the way it fits in with the personality of Myra, or causes you to assume the ideals you'd come to believe were unsound.
Either way Myra Breckinridge bestows literacy with a novel full of provoking premise to begin recognizing, by way of the extreme, that life does not have to begin and end with time-honored tradition but instead must follow more personal laws that recognize the supremacy of within.

Confusing patchwork of letters, memos, grade reports, oddball documents...seems to suggest gender dysphoric teacher identifies with attractive young female student and wishes he were her,...so she will screw him (?). An inheritance chase ensues, and he magically becomes the girl of his own dreams (beaverly played by Raquel Welch who convincingly screws a young Farrah Fawcett). But then what. As the new girl befreinds the girl he loves, she boldly tells "new girl", "I wish you were a guy". Fitting end to a slutty story! StarlaParis cautions, "Sometimes we don't know what we got 'til it's gone".

Dark Green, Bright Red by Gore Vidal was his second novel, written when he was in his early twenties. This story of a planned revolution in a mythical South American country was probably unbelievable in its day, dealing as it did does with the involvement of the U.S. governemnt, the United Fruit Company (under another name) and an up front assumption that Uncle Sam calls the shots in Central and South America. Unfortunately Vidal does not go all the way with this story. The 'hero', a former American Army officer who has left the service under a cloud of suspicion, 'retires' to the mythical country that is the setting for the story, because his good friend from WWII is the former President's son. Soon he is caught up in a plot to bring the former president to power once more, and also involved in an affair with the former president's daughter. Obviously no good can come of this, and of course it doesn't. The conclusion is to be expected and the main character leaves the story having experienced much but seemingly having learned little.There is a lot of interest here, especially the clear view that Vidal has of the role played in Latin American relations by entities such as the United Fruit Company and the willingness of the U.S. Government to go to great lenghts to support them. It would be decades before the public at large would recognize this as true. For this alone the book is worth reading.

Although this novel provides interesting insights into how at least some people were thinking in the 1940's, and some equally interesting anecdotal material regarding the great and near great Americans of the time, it fails as a novel. Its principal characters are no more than stick figures; they never come alive, never make the reader care about what happens to them. They are little more than mouthpieces for Vidal to bring out his views of some of the happenings the age -- e.g. the theory that the attack on Pearl Harbor was deliberately instigated by the Roosevelt administration and that efforts to provide advance warning to those directly affected were deliberately thwarted as part of a master plan to get us into the war. Vidal's views on Truman are equally negative, to the point of being outrageous, but views of these kinds and the anecdotes that support them provide virtually all of the interest that the book offers. Vidal can -- and has -- done much better (e.g. Burr, Lincoln, 1876).

In his historical novels, Gore Vidal brings the solemn marble statues of American history to brilliant life by letting them talk. And talk. His books are long, sometimes lacivious conversations, and his characters distinguish themselves -- sometimes extinguishing themselves to the reader-- through their own words.

For instance, in The Golden Age, a large helping of World War II era spilled beans, a young man at a New York party responds to the idea that America needs a new civilization to go with its new global ascendancy by saying, ''Do we really want a civilization?... We've done awfully well as the hayseeds of the Western world. Why spoil it?... No, we've got to stay dumb.''

Yes, that signature cynicism is uttered by the author himself, making a brief cameo. So if you won't find gore, you will find Gore in this 100 percent action free wartime novel, the seventh and last in the linked sequence of American history novels that begins chronologically with ''Burr'' (although Vidal wrote what's now volume 6, ''Washington, D.C.,'' way back in 1967) and adds up to a talkative masterpiece.

Also in captivity, among a mob of mid century American potentates, are Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, Cary Grant, and Tennessee Williams.

As usual, the conversation's good. Vidal's animated historical figures aren't farcically pompous, but they are, like Vidal himself, trenchant, sporadically wise, and routinely malicious. He delivers verbal stilettos to just about every eminent back that appears.

The more ominous conversations are about America's backing into the war and its lurching role in the postwar world. If you've been following the story through previous novels like ''Empire'' and ''Hollywood,'' you know the anti imperialist gospel according to Gore.

Here, Vidal's FDR sees involvement in the Nazi launched European war as a winnable shot at an American administered worldwide New Deal, and -- craftily and charmingly -- he goes for it mainly (in what has been the novel's most controversial assertion) by provoking the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. The global war produces, in Vidal's version, a new America that loses its republican innocence and becomes a Cold War garrison state.

In other words, we should have stayed dumb, or played dumb. One of Vidal's mostly marginal fictional characters, wandering in from the earlier novels, launches a magazine and declares, ''I intend to create... America's Golden Age.'' For Vidal, it was that brief parenthesis of national elation, between war and Cold War, that was a Golden Age, followed by fool's gold -- we're now stuck in a congested ''technological Calcutta'' of a planet.

Wherever you shelve its populist isolationist politics, ''The Golden Age'' works as a mordant evocation of historical personalities and turning points, and above all, as monumental past tense gossip.

There is an old saying that when it's time to go out, go out with a bang. This is exactly what Gore Vidal does in this, the last novel in his "American Chronicles" series. An updating and rewriting of his earlier novel, "Washington, D.C.," "The Golden Age" shifts its focus to the nation as a whole and the chain of events that involved us in World War 2 and the Cold War. Gossipy and inclusive rather than pedantic and exclusive (as many historical novels tend to be), Vidal gives the reader the view of an insider, partially because he had grown up on the fringes of that inside. Among the many historical character the reader meets in the pages of the novel is none other than Gore Vidal himself. This should be no surprise as Vidal is one of the most autobiographical of American authors, his memoir "Palimpsest" reading almost like a novel. Non-Vidal fans may not like the Calvino-esque ending, but those among us who love Vidal's writings will feel more than a touch of sadness at the end. More entertaining than "Empire" or "Hollywood," "The Golden Age" belongs on the shelf of all serious readers.

Sure, if you can get past his stereotypes of Native Americans and other ethnic groups; his homophobia; and his racism; then you might actually enjoy this book. I take that back. Mr. Vidal is so full of himself, so self-conscious of his sentences, that its impossible to focus on the story. He's always smirking and trying to show why he's smarter than someone else. It might be better if he picked up some of the classics and learned a lesson or two. Is he iconoclastic? No, just close minded.

A clever "museum-based" book is Gore Vidal's 1998 novel, The Smithsonian Institution. In this fictional invention, set in 1939, Vidal imagines a Smithsonian where the exhibits come to life each day at closing time, and where the museum staff is working with the exhibit characters and real-life scientists, such as Oppenheimer and Einstein, to develop the atomic bomb. Into all this steps T., a teenage boy from St. Alban's School who has absentmindedly scribbled the key equation for the bomb in the margins of his algebra final. When the exhibits come to life, T. joins them in their time. Thus, his first after-hours wandering finds him in an old west exhibit, where he is nearly roasted alive by a group of native americans (The woman who rescues him, who, it turns out, is Mrs. Grover Cleveland, calls him "Veal" for the remainder of the story). In the course of his work, T. discovers a means successfully to time-travel. (A previous, unsuccessful, attempt at time travel by Smithsonian staff rescued Lincoln from Ford's Theatre the moment he was struck with the bullet, with the result that a slightly addled Lincoln now presides in the bowels of the musuem as curator of ceramics). T. takes on himself to alter events so that the world wars do not happen; he prevents wars in Europe, but succeeds in moving Pearl Harbor forward by two years. As always, Vidal is incapable of writing a dull sentence, and this short (260 pgs.) novel marvelously combines great humor, clever conundrums, and serious questions. Vidal has no sacred cows, so some part of his impressions of historical figures and events is sure to offend any reader. Very enjoyable!

Centering around a main character named T., The Smithsonian Institution is part science fiction and part historical fact. T. is a child blessed with a gift for mathematics, and is enlisted by the government to help with the Manhattan project in the early 1940's. T. soon finds himself immersed in a world of greater fantasy than reality. He is hamming it up with Abe Lincoln, and discussing physics theories with Albert Einstein. As he searches for a way to end the war and create a nuclear bomb, T. finds that stranger things than normal are happening at the Smithsonian. T. soon finds himself consumed with time travel and changing history to stop a war that he knows will have a deadly outcome for himself. Gore Vidal has written a wildly entertaining book but it is not for the unimaginative. The reader must be willing to follow Vidal on his sidetracks and accept whatever strange conclusion they may have without using the historical reality available for judgement. Anyone who enjoys history and science fiction will enjoy this book, as long as it is not looked to for strict historical accuracy.

Don't spend any more time looking for this book. There are plenty more books where Gore trounces around pretentiously, saying "look how smart I am!" And most of them have plots. This one doesn't. He had one clever idea, and instead of developing, turned out post-modern wannabe. Stick to historical fiction, mr. vidal!

Having already read most of Vidal's novels, plus Palimpsest, I was a little baffled by the time I'd reached the end of Two Sisters. The basic plot is that the narrator (V) is reading through a film script and notes written by a friend from the past (Eric); V realises that he didn't know Eric as well as he thought. Along the way, the usual Vidal subjects appear: death, sex, history, the decline of the novel... What is baffling is that at times V seems quite clearly to be Vidal himself; at others, we are assured that this is a work of fiction. I found myself distracted by speculations as to what was "real" and what not. Presumably Vidal's point, but ultimately it did hamper my enjoyment of a thoughtful, intriguing book. (Incidentally, readers drawn solely by promises on the book's cover of "scandal" and "taboo" will probably be very disappointed).