![]() ![]() It starts a few days before Lincoln's inauguration and ends (I hope I'm giving nothing away) just after his assassination. Maybe there's some sort of rule that you can't be a great essayist and a great novelist at the same time.īy which I mean that Vidal is a great novelist, and Lincoln is an exceptionally good book. He seems like a stand-up comedian repeatedly reworking the same material - I would enjoy the performance, but since the ideas were old there was nothing left but the style and maybe a phrase or two. I also got the sense that the essays that I thought were really great, durable pieces - the end of his review of a Dos Passos novel, for example, or his essay on Suetonius - were all written in the mid-50s, before Vidal started producing the historical novels for which he's best known his essays from this later period get more and more showy. ![]() ![]() I came to Vidal through his essays, which I read nonstop for an entire week before I started to feel like I was reading the same thing again and again. ![]()
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