Discovering the Obvious

...Occasionally Vidal will meander away from his narrative to offer Deep Thoughts (without noticeable relevance to the plot) on the state of American society, Western civilization, the human race, etc...

...His ideas and themes have a stale flavor...

...Attacking American writers, he declares that "Tlie Great Gatsby is their idea of a masterpiece and the work of a Musil (or even Proust) unknown country not worth exploring...

...Unhappily, this vitality is generally poisoned by vulgar subject matter or crushed by artistic pretension...

...The journal entries are counterpointed with Vidal's own speculations and musings, leaping back and forth across the 20-year barrier...

...I don't think she was pleased...

...One is immensely relieved each time Vidal permits Eric's voice (via the diaries) to take over...

...But isn't it natural that contemporary American writers should be less influenced by European culture than by their own...

...Love affairs can only take place after the act, in memory, at a decent remove from urgent flesh and that colliding of masks which seldom does more than meliorate the fact of two hostile and alien—yet so similar—wills...

...Oh Helena," he cries exultantly, "what is an empress to a god...

...Much of Eric's diary is devoted to an account of his uncomfortable association with Murray Morris, a gross caricature of an Otto Preminger-type producer...

...Given Vidal's often reiterated belief that fiction is dead, it is somehow fitting that the best work in this novel is not the narrative but the rather extraneous scenario...

...This latest book is loosely structured and fragmented, incorporating a full-length movie scenario, the author's political, literary and moral reflections, short cinematic scenes, and a rapid crosscutting between events past and present...

...Reviewed by Robert F. Moss Department of English, Hunter College In Myra Breckinridge Gore Vidal advanced the not-very-original idea that fiction is dead and "the only true form is the memoir," thus yielding to what he perceived as the tyranny of the fact...

...Faithful to the logic of his postulate, Vidal has now given us Two Sisters, billed as "A Novel in the Form of a Memoir...

...Quite apart from the triteness, it is hard to square such sentiment with Vidal's play, The Best Man, where he certainly lit a few candles for the Stevensoni-an character, William Russell...

...In terms of its larger structural patterns, Two Sisters is virtually a summary of recent developments in contemporary fiction...

...The real explanation, of course, lies in the quality of Vidal's wit and irony, which is consistently facile and superficial, the work of a man who feels little but talks much, whose chic remarks may be overheard at any literary kaffee klatsch...

...Nothing more...

...His attitudinizing is usually delivered from a resolutely pessimistic stance, as on politics and political figures: "Believing in a man, taking seriously a President, is to enjoy the security of childhood come a second time...

...The various ruminations in Two Sisters on the nature of memory are as Proustian as tea and madeleine...

...But though man-worship is more reasonable than god-worship, I have never been able to light so much as a candle to another's glory...

...he imparts the only fire, the only energy to an otherwise listless tale...

...American writers want to be not good but great...

...It is this omnipresent derivativeness that finally cancels out even the minimal virtues of Vidal's book...

...they seem to be shreds and scraps gleaned from the work of keener sensibilities, finer minds...

...Predictably, he feels unappreciated: American critics are unre-ceptive to him, he claims, because of the literary tools he has chosen, wit and irony...

...There, disencumbered of most of his "serious intentions," Vidal is able to concoct a gamy mixture of political intrigue, incest, romantic misalignments, and old-fashioned spectacle...

...and so is neither...

...it has no relevance to the young, who were brought up on television and movies...

...Their brother Herostratus (who is also Helena's lover) harbors revolutionary dreams, but the sisters, fearful of political upheaval, betray him...

...Life is present...

...Unfortunately, there is little else of interest in this awkward, imitative novel...

...She was—is?—one of those rare women with whom one likes to talk after the act...

...It abounds in Parisian cafes and Roman palazzi, arrant name-dropping and incessant literary chitchat...

...In his search for the "real Eric," Vidal finds a mystery for every revelation and an uneasy doubt for every facile assumption...

...This inadequacy is as clear in Vidal's reflective passages as in his narrative...

...Essentially a creator of graceful entertainment (Romulus, The Best Man), Vidal has let his pretensions outpace his ability...

...As a social and political commentator, Vidal shares one quality with Joe Cantwell, the villain of The Best Man: He can "always state the obvious with a real sense of discovery...

...At no point in the narrative does Vidal relinquish his excruciating sophistication...

...he finally concludes that truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder...

...The supposedly comic expose of show business philistinism is heavy and coarse, far less successful than, for instance, Merle Miller's Only You, Dick Daring...

...Artistically, the novel's s'ender plot about mistaken paternity, frustrated lust and incest is ridiculously inflated by the second-hand profundities Vidal injects into it...

...Van Damm is dead when the novel opens, the victim of an accidental fall during a riot in Berkeley, and Vidal attempts a mosaiclike reconstruction of his friend's life—aided by two documents Van Damm left behind, a diary covering the summer of 1948 and a screenplay...

...His memory of an affair with Marietta 20 years before is typical: "My recollection is that I was tired a good deal of the time (I was coming down with hepatitis) but enjoyed being with her at the Hotel de F Universite in Paris for a summer (in 1947 it was always summer) because she had a gift for intimacy...

...When Vidal turns to American culture, his indictment is no less hackneyed: "Civilization has not taken hold even in our alabaster cities...

...Behind the action (and sometimes in front of it) lies an atmosphere of languid nihilism: "But then . . . what is done from moment to moment is all there is...

...More appalling are Vidal's petty thefts from the works of his avowed master, Marcel Proust...

...Most of Vidal's portion of the story is limp with a tone of jaded cosmopolitanism that is guaranteed to set anyone's teeth on edge...

...and presents numerous celebrities—among them Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac and Andre Gide—in cameo appearances...

...The Eric-Erika relationship is suspiciously reminiscent of Pursewarden's affair with his sister in The Alexandria Quartet...

...As for literature...

...There is a lingering tendency among certain reviewers to regard Vidal as a great unrealized talent, a writer with impressive gifts that have never quite borne the fruit they should have...

...Vidal is much concerned in this book with the deceptiveness of memory, about which he notes: "Perhaps it is all an illusion, a set of false impressions dealing with possibilities rather than with actual things...

...The trouble here, as elsewhere in his fiction, is that Vidal wants to be not meaningful but clever...

...Honest, tough-minded, brutally impatient with affectation, Eric is as close as Vidal comes to creating a believable and engaging character...

...From the rather unconvincing activities of his characters, Vidal deduces the following about human relationships: "But then none of us exists except in terms of others, and so with each person, not only a different performance but a different self...

...Rather the opposite, for violence is now the order of the day...

...Indeed, Vidal has contributed to this misconception by adopting the tone of voice of an artist without manifesting any of the scope or imagination that should go with it...

...and so are neither...

...Entitled Two Sisters of Ephesus, it mercifully abducts the reader from Vidal's pallid contemporary setting and transports him to the Persian empire, circa 300 bc...

...The titular sisters are Helena and Artemisa, middle-class Greeks who have married into positions of prominence and authority within the empire...

...The bulk of the action is generated by Vidal's friendship with Marietta Donegal, a predatory and omnivorous female novelist, by Van Damm's efforts to collaborate with some Hollywood people on a screenplay, and by his incestuous relations with his twin sister, Erika...

...The movie plot is contrived expertly: The structure is solid, the characters lively, the dialogue piquant, the situations absorbing...

...Moreover, does Vidal think, as his statement implies, that American authors are not even good...

...In one sequence—a conversation between Vidal and a social-climbing poet—Vidal seems to be on the verge of rewriting Swann's Way (casting himself as Charles Swann...

...Vidal appears as himself (he is called "V...

...The subject of the "memoir" is Eric Van Damm, a presumably fictional film director whose magnetism has gripped nearly all the other characters...

...In revenge he burns the Temple of Diana, snatching fame from them and securing the immortality they hunger for...

...Vain, self-seeking, fiercely jealous, they maneuver against each other in an endless struggle for power...

...Throughout, Vidal is proud of his "realistic" view of things...

...Post coitum Marietta I once called her...

...From the author-as-character (Mailer) to the use of a manuscript as a gloss on the life of its author (Nabokov), there are many echoes in this novel —clangorous echoes...