If not among historians (surely the history cannot be faulted, as it comes with the imprimatur of one of our most eminent Lincoln scholars, David Herbert Donald of Harvard), or among readers with a temperamental distrust ofįiction's usual strategies (they will love '' Lincoln''). Vidal's '' Lincoln'' with its necessary but somewhat misleading subtitle, ''A Novel,'' certain to be a controversial work among literary critics,
Consistency, as Whitman knew, is one of the minor American virtues. Vidal the writer ofįiction, one should not hold it against him. Vidal the polemicist is frequently at odds with, and not particularly nourishing to, Mr. While being told that he is at work on a ''chronicle'' of novels dealing with American history. Vidal contradict himself in his practice as a writer, one is not surprised to read, as long ago as 1967, that he has all but given up on prose fiction (''three centuries is quite long enough for any literary form'') Upon mortality ''Two Sisters,'' as fully present in those critical essays in which, out of habit perhaps, he routinely excoriates experimentation in fiction, as it is in an experimental attempt of his own, last PRODIGIOUS Gore Vidal - the author, with this massive and carefully researched volume on Lincoln's Presidency, of some 25 books (19 novels, five collections of essays, one collection of short stories) andįive plays so kaleidoscopic in his interests, his energies and the remarkable range of his talents, the Vidal voice is as readily discernible in the comic masterpiece ''Myra Breckinridge'' as in the somber meditation Section 7, Column 3 Book Review DeskĪ Novel. June 3, 1984, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
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