Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship

For over twenty years, Gore Vidal has been one of America's most successful if unpredictable novelists. At the same time, as readers of the New York Review of Books, Esquire, The New Statesman know, he has been an outstanding literary social critic. His first collection of essays, Rocking the Boat, contained, according to Philip Rahv, "some of the most courageous, liveliest, and wittiest comment on literature, the theater and social life that has been written in America." Gore Vidal's second collection of essays has the same wide range as the first: pornography, the French "New Novel," the Kennedys, Tarzan, Nixon, the future of liberalism and the nature of conservatism, Once again, in these essays, "Gore Vidal brings," as Norman Mailer once wrote, "a brave and cultivated wit to the pomades of the national suet."