Shirley Kossick
new fiction
A major literary event of 2000 was the publication of The Golden Age (Little, Brown) by Gore Vidal, the seventh and final volume in his magisterial sequence, Narratives Of Empire. In these works Vidal seamlessly integrates fictional characters notably several generations of the Sanford family with historical reality. Tracing American history from the founding fathers (Burr, 1973) up to 1950, Vidal covers in the present volume some of the material used in Washington DC (1967). However, his view of the years 1939 to 1950 has undergone a radical revision, one which has provoked heated debate, not least from Clive James in the Times Literary Supplement.
But Vidal is well equipped to handle what he calls in his Afterword, ”the inevitable fury that truth-telling often evokes”. Having grown up in Washington in the home of his senator grandfather, Vidal is a seasoned observer of political tactics which he regards with characteristic irony.
In this more sombre treatment especially of Roosevelt Vidal notes that ”what we thought was a bright beginning was actually a last flare in the dark!” Nevertheless, this does not detract from the readability of The Golden Age nor dim the brilliance of its many set pieces.
Armistead Maupin is also famed for a sequence of novels Tales of the City (1978 to 1990) which started life as a San Francisco newspaper series. In a witty self-referential device he makes the narrator of The Night Listener (Bantam), Gabriel Noone, a successful homosexual writer chronicling life in San Francisco for a radio series later turned into a book.
The story centres on 13-year-old Pete Lomax who has endured years of sexual abuse. When Noone receives a proof copy of Pete’s harrowing autobiography his compassion is aroused and he engages in protracted telephone conversations with the boy. As this gripping and emotionally taut tale evolves the narrator has to confront not only the problems posed by the boy, but those posed by his own ambivalences and relationships.
Patrick Gale is a biographer of Maupin and his new novel, Rough Music (Flamingo), features another young boy, Julian, and a homosexual theme. Like Gale himself, Julian is the son of an English prison governor and his childhood is wonderfully evoked.
The shock of discovering his mother’s adultery during a Cornish summer holiday resonates throughout the novel. Alternating chapters of early experiences with events many years later, Gale skilfully depicts the complexity of family dynamics both from a child’s and an adult perspective, frequently using apt literary and film references.
The arresting plot and Gale’s sensitive handling of the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and human frailty generally make Rough Music compulsive reading.
Fortune’s Rocks (Abacus), Anita Shreve’s seventh novel, is now available in paperback. Quite different from her earlier successes (The Weight of Water, 1997, and The Pilot’s Wife, 1998), this novel is set in 1899 and focuses on 16-year-old Olympia whose affair with a much older man has profound consequences for her future. The dramatic climax involves an ingeniously argued court case whose outcome is startling yet apposite.