[In the following review, Miller offers a positive assessment of The Smithsonian Institution.]

On the dust-jacket of Gore Vidal’s new novel [The Smithsonian Institution], a blond hunk and a Scarlett O’Hara maiden clinch steamily, Jeff Koons-style, in a flowerbed, while the museum of the title glowers forbiddingly over them like a buxom aunt. Professional curators will at this point realize, perhaps with some regret, that the book does not offer a literal portrait of daily life in a great museum. For the rest of us, the fable which the lurid jacket clothes is an attractive alternative to the forced Sunday traipse, the dog-eared labels and termite-ridden exhibits, the disgraceful coffee in the Institute. Vidal’s Smithsonian is byzantine, organic, omniscient, linked in some mysterious way to the US Government, the US military, or both; and the exhibits come frolicsomely alive after dark. One comes away with the feeling that if museums aren’t really like this, then they should be.

Now I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to pay attention. T, a teenage maths prodigy and star athlete, is delivered to the Smithsonian by taxi on the brink of the Second World War. He is set to work eliminating the risk of chain reaction from nuclear explosions, and meanwhile entertained by a squaw from the Early Indian Exhibit, who, confusingly, is also the first incarnation of President Grover Cleveland’s wife (two terms in office, two inaugural gowns for the First Lady, two wives). As a fringe benefit to his bomb research, T perfects a form of time travel. Glimpsing his mutilated self in a Battle of the Pacific exhibit already being set up, he resolves to go into the past and avert the coming conflict, not by removing Hitler—for this is America—but by blackmailing Woodrow Wilson out of standing for the governorship of New Jersey. To us this may seem as insignificant as the flapping of a butterfly’s wing, but the plan is that America will be (would have been) kept out of the First World War, which will fizzle (would have fizzled) out, avoiding the economic privations which will lead (would have led—you get the idea) to the rise of Nazism.

When T returns from 1910, lots of little things have changed—he is, for example, two years older—and a few big things. Trotsky is the Soviet president; Hitler has made it as an architect (perhaps the most implausible thing in the book). T’s glimpses into the future no longer reveal a nuclear apocalypse. Unfortunately, he still seems scheduled to die at Guam. It turns out that there has been a steady escalation in the Pacific during the 1930s, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor has taken place eighteen months early. A renegade officer, Colonel Douglas MacArthur, is making propaganda broadcasts for the Japanese. It is left to T, assisted by Charles Lindbergh, to set up a base inside the Arctic Circle and scare the oriental foe into submission by nuking the top off Mount Fuji. For good measure, he saves his other self from death on the battlefield, though only at the cost of being hideously wounded himself. The story ends happily, with T repaired by arcane medical techniques, and admitted to the Valhalla that is the Smithsonian’s permanent fellowship. Here, James Smithson himself, who turns out to have had a longstanding interest in T’s career, runs the show, and the Keeper of Ceramics is none other than Abraham Lincoln, whisked away from 1865 and the malign attentions of John Wilkes Booth in an early, and only partially successful, time-travel experiment. Best of all, T gets the girl, her other self sportingly pretending to be a big sister, while an indulgent Grover Cleveland makes a speech.

Before his own period of infatuation with the themes of big science, Martin Amis prefaced an early novel with an endearing caveat: “I may not know much about science but I know what I like.” The motto might have served Gore Vidal well here. For all the snatches of technical jargon—a superstring here, a unified field theory there—he is not gravely preoccupied with plausibility. The hardware on display is as generalized and cranky as in a Flash Gordon movie, while the logical problems of time travel are handled with playful inconsistency. Certainly there would be no story if it were impossible to change the past—if what’s done is done, as it were—but T’s adventures in the fourth dimension, even though they may have a million detailed and unpredictable ramifications (shades of chaos theory), seem in the end to have changed nothing much. There is still war, there are still presidents, there is still—bunkered, autonomous, changeless—the Smithsonian Institution.

In fact, Vidal is more excited about the poor man’s time machine, history. Much of the humour in the book comes from his deft characterizations of the dead presidents, who meet for a pow-wow in the cod Georgetown of the Institution on the eve of the Japanese war. Here, Vidal indulges two lifelong passions; prissily exact sideswipes at American political biographers, and a propensity for thinking the unthinkable about American public life. The Wilson episode hints at a shady cabal of unelected power-brokers whom Wilson must court for preferment—the world inside the world, as Don DeLillo puts it—and Vidal goes on to have the country’s first rulers accuse its twentieth-century ones of lapsing into imperialism. There are even references to a later escapade: “And so to save Asians from Asians, the white race, as I perhaps wrongly insist in regarding us, must do battle with an island people far, far away in every sense”, snaps Washington to Roosevelt. There are numerous references to French Indo-China, just in case anybody has failed to get the point. Vidal understands that both intervention in, and isolation from, foreign wars tend to have some racial element, whether in the smug assumptions of superiority which underlie America’s present attempts to be the world’s gendarme, or in the belief that a white life is worth more than a yellow one. However, either through his own isolationism or in an unpleasant lapse from moral watchfulness, he suggests that a century in which the Holocaust does not take place is interchangeable with a century in which it does. The Second World War was not purely about national interests.

The story’s themes and puzzles crystallize in the person of T. He seems at times like a value in a mathematical equation (“time”, presumably), while the single letter’s brash rectilinearity is a kind of calligraphic rendering of the straight-backed all-American hero. He is also, as it turns out, the result of a long exercise in eugenics—but what old-money East Coast kid is not? In any case there is a kind of inertness about him. His genius is less intellectual than visionary; he is a vehicle for other people’s desires and expectations (even Vidal seems to regard him with more than proprietorial care). Like Kafka’s Josef K (another one-letter name), he is suddenly thrown into a crazy world; only T, with a childish capacity for wonder, blithely goes with the flow. The whole experience is a kind of fairy tale—but of course nuclear weapons reduce everything to a kind of fairy tale. Vidal appreciates that hilarity and bewilderment are entirely appropriate responses to the ridiculous, appalling events at the heart of our century.