Vidal, Burr, Bachmann

Gore Vidal’s Burr is a very bad book.

Michele Bachmann read it her senior year in college; she graduated in 1978. I was a bit older, working on my dissertation, when I bought a copy in 1973, soon after it came out in paperback.

She says his snotty treatment of the founding fathers was what offended her. I don’t remember exactly what irritated me, except it made me so angry I wanted to throw the book across the room. At the time, my generalization was that it represented a failure of imagination.

I’ve since continued to read his essays, including the most recent that could use a stronger editorial presence. However, I never read another of his serious works of fiction. Myra Breckinridge might be an important novel, but I’ll never know why.

I eventually did relent a little to read the three mysteries he published earlier as Edgar Box. They were readable, but not compelling enough to make me wish he’d continued writing them. As I recall, the failure of imagination in them was limited to the sex scenes. Following the hard-boiled detective tradition, Vidal felt it necessary to have his hero, Peter Sargeant, become involved with woman. However, he could only say, after he got them together, “and then they did it,” sounding much like an adolescent boy describing the wonders of something he didn’t yet know but needs to pretend he did.

Bachmann says her feelings about the book turned her from being a Democrat to a Republican. I don’t believe she’s ever said why she associated Burr with the Democrats, if it was the politics of Vidal which are snobbishly critical of both parties, or if the person who recommend the book to her was a Democrat.

In my case, I turned on the editorial establishment that had promoted the book as “wicked entertainment of a very high order,” a “tour de force,” a “novel of Stendhalian proportions,” to quote only blurbs from the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.

I’ve rarely ever read another review of a novel since, and then only of books or authors I had never heard of, usually from foreign countries. I suspect I’ve missed a good read or two, but I’m know I missed a great deal of boredom from being trapped on the same page with whatever the claque was promoting at the moment.