Gore Vidal and Jonathan Franzen - Together at Last!

Fall considerably more advanced in the hinterland than in either T-burg or Hyde Park (officially a part of the NYC metropolitan area!)

I listened to the Pope’s address to Congress on the drive up. Surprisingly moving.

Drove up early to catch Cinemapolis’s last showing of The Best of Enemies, the recent documentary about the Gore Vidal/William F. Buckley Jr. 1968 primary debates.

I’m a big Gore Vidal fan. Not of his novels, which (with the possible exceptions of Julian and Burr) are little crafted stages of words through which badly drawn cardboard caricatures of historical personages, familiar to you from high school civics classes, scamper and cavort – but of his essays, which I consider absolutely brilliant.

We share – shared – a surprising number of opinions on various literary, historical, and political topics, although his opinions, of course, were always much more eloquently and succinctly expressed.

Never had the slightest use for Buckley or The National Review, although I like Christopher Buckley’s comic novels a lot.

I kinda, sorta recall the Chicago convention riots. I was one of those super smart kids that teachers kept skipping, much to the detriment of my social development. So I actually ended up as a freshman at UC Berkeley in 1968 at the age of 16. I can remember pushing little Alicia in a pram across Sproul Plaza as we were being tear-gassed. I think that disturbance was some kind of outcrop of the Democratic Convention Riots, although, of course, who remembers now?

What’s most interesting about The Best of Enemies, though, is that Vidal and Buckley were essentially mirror images of one another. Same age. Same ridiculous mid-Atlantic patrician accent. Same hairstyle (parted on the left!) By 1968, their faces were even the same. (Gravity renders all white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male faces identically, particularly when imbibing large amounts of alcohol has been a major part of those WASP personal histories.)

Vidal turns out to have been a better fortuneteller. The world really does seem to be falling into place along the lines that he predicted.

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I’m about a third of the way through Jonathan Franzen’s Purity.

Purity has three main flaws, so far as I can tell.

Flaw #1: Protagonist is called Pip. No protagonists should ever be called Pip -- the Great Expectations homage factor is just a leetle too cringe-worthy. Minor characters may be called Pip but only if they're corner boys in the hood hustling smack, and Richard Price is writing about them.

Flaw #2: The language is too rich. Every sentence Franzen writes is allusional, dense, crammed with subtext that the reader must unpack. This is waaaaay too much work for the reader if the reader is me! I think the perfect ratio here is three perfect sentences to a paragraph where all the other sentences are workhorses consisting of Subject/Verb/Object/PERIOD.

Flaw #3: Franzen is not particularly an empathetic writer. Which means he's not good at channeling characters that move into one's imagination. Here, his protagonist is a 24-year old girl. And yet I retain the impression that his protagonist is... Franzen! In a dress and a wig! The effect is unsettling. Kind of as though Noah Baumbach and Greta Gertwig had somehow gotten trapped inside my Kindle.