Volume 23, Number 7 · April 29, 1976
Passions in Politics
By Michael Wood
1876
by Gore Vidal
Random House, 364 pp., $10.00
In the early pages of 1876, the narrator of the novel, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, an American returning to his native New York after nearly forty years in Europe, is interviewed by the local press and catches sight of a sketch an artist is making of him: 'a short stout pigeon of a man with three chins lodged in an exaggerated highwinged collar…and of course the snubbed nose, square jaw of a Dutchman no longer young.' This is an ingenious way of smuggling a description of a first-person narrator into a novel, but it is also curiously awkward, and makes one wonder why a writer would put himself through such antics. The same is true of the form of 1876 generally. Schuyler is confiding his thoughts and impressions to a notebook: 'These pages are to be a quarry, no more. A collection of day-to-day impressions of my new old country.'
Review, 2061 words
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