[In an early essay Vidal wrote] that the shrinking audience for fiction was really a good thing, because it left the novel only "the best things: that exploration of the inner world's divisions and distinctions where no camera may follow."… (p. 1)

[In contrast,] "Kalki" is a potboiler: subspecies, disaster movie. Drugs, sex, espionage, apocalypse, even the morally damaged Vietnam Vet, who has become whatever-comes-after-ubiquitous—the synopsis reads, as in part the novel does, like a compendium of television specials. Recalling the language of Mr. Vidal's 1958 essay, it should be noted that this novel is careful never to go where the camera may not follow with ease….

"Kalki" is so calculated, so replete with salable clichés that it raises in the sharpest way the question that must nag even Mr. Vidal's admirers: How can taste and intelligence so palpably superior spend themselves on such trendiness?

The question isn't rhetorical, and there are at least two ways to answer, sympathetic to Mr. Vidal; his quality as a critic earns him at least two benefits of doubt. The first is to say that Mr. Vidal isn't exploiting the trendy, he's parodying it. Consider Theodora "Teddy" Ottinger, who narrates "Kalki." Getting to know her, we're meant to have Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying" in mind…. [Teddy is] the world's best jet pilot, and the best-selling author of "Beyond Motherhood," about her "life and hard times as a flier, woman, mother, and would-be know-it-all."… Poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, just out of earshot of Merv Griffin, she is invited by a smarmy New York press lord to do a magazine piece on Kalki [a Vietnam veteran who claims to be a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu], for much money, but quickly, so as to scoop Mike Wallace's "60 Minutes."

Handling such a scene, Mr. Vidal is, as it were, at poolside himself. He clefs away, or drops names outright: Joan Didion, Clay Felker. He is utterly beglamoured, and can't take his eyes off the passing stars. It's bitter social satire: of course, of course. But, as we know, there is a certain high intensity of attention that, however critical in tone, is tantamount to love itself….

The novel is, however, critical and even harsh in tone, mainly because we observe the world, which is coming to its well-deserved end, through the eyes of Teddy, who has steeped her mind in the mordant skepticism of Pascal. Rational and unsentimental to the point of superstition, she is the nastiest possible slur on the reconstructed woman of the 70's. Here she is on a visit to Earl Jr.:

"I must have felt something for him once, I thought, staring through the martini's first comforting haze at my ex-husband's pale double chin.

"Tears came to my eyes. There were tears in his eyes, too. Love? Tenderness? Regret? No. It was the red-alert smog, creeping up the Santa Monica Canyon…."

Finding out that love is only air pollution is the sort of bland demystification that is found in the silliest feminist fiction. One expects that someone with Mr. Vidal's wit and social vision would detect the poverty of feeling in this humor; one expects that he would choose a narrator who detects the stereotype in herself. If she doesn't, or at least not consistently, perhaps it's because her sourness toward the emotional life is, without mitigation, her creator's own. (p. 22)

[When] we can't defend what is lurid and show-biz in Mr. Vidal's novels by saying that they're parodies, we can still take them seriously as the moral or philosophical allegories that they are ostensibly set up to be. "Kalki" is an end-of-the-world fantasy, resembling, according to the jacket copy, "Brave New World" and "1984." Its associations within Mr. Vidal's fiction, however, are with his two previous messianic novels, "Julian" and especially "Messiah."…

But as an allegory of the Last Things …, "Kalki" is worse than banal, it's irresponsible. Taken at its word, it is, after all, a big idea: big enough for Voltaire, or Pope. But Mr. Vidal cheats. He imagines an end to human life after showing us only the most tawdry and lamentable specimens. Who would regret such an end if the world were made up only of what we see in "Kalki": junkies on park benches, matrons bragging about their cancer operations, trash-minded media men from New York? Mr. Vidal doesn't portray people, or even caricatures, but, rather, insults of representation—condescending and unfelt. Not people, but cartoon figures die when Kalki dances. Dealing honestly with the significance of his theme would have required showing a fit sense, somewhere, of the greatness of the imagined loss…. Mr. Vidal lacks that sense, and lacks in general the humane fullness that the apocalyptic imagination of his story demands. (p. 26)