Gore Vidal

[Rodney Welch]

John Boylan notes that Gore Vidal has "a mix of reservation and
> > admiration for TRP," and that Vidal hoped GR would not fall into the
> > clutches of the academy."
> >
> >         Actually, if I recall correctly, Vidal believed that Pynchon and
> > Barth were made for the academy; I think Vidal pegged GR as a fairly
> > representative example of the "U Novel" -- the "University Novel,"
> > written to be taught rather than to be read. Vidal is incapable of
> > writing about literature without bemoaning its decline -- the art of
> > Howells, James and Faulkner proving utterly defenseless in the face of
> > television and rock and roll, which have lowered the national threshold
> > for the literary attention span.
> >
> >         I think Vidal, something of a Luddite himself, found Barth and
> > Pynchon fairly indicative of a anti-literary age; "anti" not so much in
> > the sense that their books were dumb as that they were specialized and
> > academic. Vidal once said that American writers don't want to write good
> > books, they want to write great books, and as a result they usually write
> > neither. I'm sure GR was, is, his worst nightmare.
> > RW