We come to believe him and how that phrase 'this time, or now' resounds back and forth throughout the whole of American history. ' hardly worse than that of anyone else at the time, or now,' remarks young Charlie Schuyler at one point to 'the sententious and moralising' William Cullen Bryant: how sincerely Vidal achieves, and what leverage it gives him to tear that past Vidal's complicated plot! By setting the present- tense of his story in the 1830's and having Aaron Burr recall in his lively old age his memories of the Revolutionary War, the early history of the Republic,Īnd his famous contests with Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson (as if these mythic events had happened only yesterday)-what a telescoping of the legendary past Mr. Yet for all this documentary authenticity, how alive and immediate everything Right places, on the right dates, doing what the actually did' and the conversations, though partly made up, always reflect the recorded views of the speakers. Vidal assures us, 'could, obviously, be based on no one at all') as for the actual historical figures who appear in the novel-only in three minor cases are they not 'in the Vidal identifies in his Afterword as 'based roughly on the obscure novelist Charles Burdett' the other is one William de la Touche Clancey, a 'Tory sodomite' with a tongue that 'darts in and out of his mouth likeĪ lizard's catching flies,' who, Mr.

Vidal has managed to stick to the actual historical record-only two of his characters are invented (one is Charles Schuyler, a law clerk and aspiring journalist who is the primary narrator of 'Burr,' and whom Mr. Vidal gives us an interpretation of our early history that says in effect that all the old verities were never much to begin with. History when all the old verities are beginning to seem hollow, Mr. Ow diabolically well-timed is the appearance of Gore Vidal's latest novel, 'Burr' just at this most disillusioning moment in American OctoBack to the First Principals By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

Lincoln a novel by gore vidal