Volume 47, Number 16 · October 19, 2000
The Best Men?
By Diane Johnson
The Golden Age
by Gore Vidal
Doubleday, 467 pp., $27.50
The reader of a historical novel, like someone at a gospel meeting, is urged to decide. He must put himself in the hands of the author. Doubt has no place. We trust that the writer has done his work, has gone to the library, or, better, remembers the events of which he writes. We like to think that in his material form he was there, in the corridors of power, or could have been, or is descended from someone whose true, inside account is here being given. Our permanent view of some notable event or figure is clay in His hands. The Golden Age is Gore Vidal's elegiac historical novel about the twentieth century, and we seem to be in good hands.
Review, 2139 words
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