Gore Vidal's Conquest of Everything, or Not Quite
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Categories: OC Bookly
This week's fall fund drive at KPFK 90.7 FM arrives as the only real non-commercial people's alternative media station struggles to make the case for what should be wildly self-evident, which made my taped interview with novelist, poet, essayist, editor and, now, biographer Jay Parini so further ironic, if also encouraging. Parini was a close friend of the late Gore Vidal, who of course lived in So Cal and could often be heard on KPFK, which is to say that he appreciated one of the few regular, consistent, available venues for his kind of historical revisionism. I miss Vidal. Parini's terrific, difficult, honest and yet celebratory telling of the life of one of the American Century's (yikes!) great, self-esteeming, provocative, witty and cringingly contradictory critics has a lot to recommend it, not the least of which the short vignettes Parini shares, moments of pathos, humor and intimacy. It's a fast read for a 400-plus page biography and, of course, Parini could have done even more had he wanted, considering the material and Vidal's 85 years. Novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, two-time (losing, of course) Senatorial candidate, media star, provocateur and, yes, the best actor ever at playing the role of one "Gore Vidal," this peripatetic and unceasingly productive, creative, engaged Man of Letters lived a full, frustrated and totally entertaining life. Which is probably what he wanted, at least while he was living it.
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