Book review: The life and loves and feuds of Gore Vidal
Written by Jay Parini, a friend of the author's until the end, this biography is too determined to treat Vidal as a serious writer and passes over some of the fun of his life
In a memoir, this would be a powerful inducement to read on, signalling precisely the kind of complicated relationship one wants in that form. But this is not a memoir. Parini, a novelist and academic, has written a traditional biography; his personal recollections of Vidal are limited mostly to the rather stagey first-person vignettes that precede each chapter. His talk of his closeness to Vidal, moreover, soon starts to seem like something of an exaggeration.
By his own telling, Parini played a rather courtly role in Vidal's realm. His subject was famous for his feuds. He and Parini, however, remained pals right until the end, perhaps for the straightforward reason that his awed biographer knew better than ever to disagree with him.
This is not to say that this is a whitewash. Parini, who first met Vidal in the 1980s when he was living near the older writer's vast Amalfi home, La Rondinaia, is certainly too soft when it comes to his novels, praising even some of the bad ones. But about the man he is mostly clear-eyed, as content to detail the spite and the sulking as the generosity, wit and cleverness.