Anybody with Roosevelt-Kennedy-Fellini-Earhart-Garbo-Capote-Tennessee Williams connections (and many more) could have turned his autobiography into something reasonably glamorous. But Vidal, who does not have to overreach for these references, manages both to exploit and upstage them all. His supercilious wit, which is as much vaunted by Vidal as it is by anyone else, remains by far this book's most alluring attribute. And when it comes to entertaining contentiousness, no target is safe — certainly not the New York Times, for which he nurtures a droll, slow-burning loathing.
One of Vidal's great stylistic gifts is the ability to structure his thoughts the way others build umbrellas. Consider this slow-opening sentence about "a translatlantic lady" named Alice Pleydell-Bouverie: "She was to the end more English than American and lived in a sort of English manor house near the village of Rhinebeck on the Hudson River not far from her endlessly irritable and irritating brother Vincent Astor, who owned much of New York City." In microcosm that illustrates how the whole book works. Vidal starts with small observations and builds them up until they ascend to the proper grandiosity — and grandeur.
Like any man who can write of himself that "contrary to legend, I was born of mortal woman, and if Zeus sired me, there is no record on file in the Cadet Hospital at the US Military Academy, West Point," Vidal is quite interested in his own legend. He spends the least interesting part of this book quibbling with critics and biographers, and casually mentioning that no small number of them have taken great interest in his life and work. But if one academic has written that Vidal "exploits the congruencies among critiques of genetic, genital and technological determinism," he needn't necessarily have repeated her words.
In the end he is his own best advertisement, with a lifetime's worth of stinging observations and sharp, combative insights to his credit. Add vanity, hubris and audacity on the same scale, and you have a man whose new memoir is unmissable. Surely he would be the first to agree.
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