[In the following review, Koenig offers a generally positive assessment of United States.]

Perhaps the greatest irony in Gore Vidal’s pieces on the state of the union, of the literary arts, and of his state of being (responses to persons and events) is the pun of the title. Though Vidal’s subject has often been American writing and government, his persona has always been that of a lordly and cynical European, swirling his cloak about him and murmuring something amusingly scandalous and unanswerable. For all Vidal’s defense of the theory of America, his opinion of it in practice is conveyed in such Lord Henry Wotton-ish exhalations as “War tends to be too much for any writer, especially one whose personality is already half obliterated by life in a democracy.”

Despite Vidal’s contempt for the lives and gods of the general public, its members (or, at least, those at Book-of-the-Month Club level) purchase his novels and pay respectful attention to his diatribes. Vidal turns this trick with the sense of complicity he creates with the reader, whom he beckons to the arm of the master’s throne, there to giggle with him at Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag. The atmosphere of naughty coziness is enhanced by Vidal’s casual grandeur: his chatty comic and tragic confidences of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, and Amelia Earhart, his easy mixture of the technical and the demotic (Anthony Burgess’s wife speaks incomprehensibly, with her “imploding diphthong,” but he works out that “Lynne was pissed off”). Then there is Vidal’s fan dance of pseudo-revelation, the kind of safe-sex writing that passes for frankness. Popular psychiatrists, he says, “cannot accept the following simple fact of so many lives (certainly my own): that it is possible to have a mature sexual relationship with a woman on Monday, and a mature sexual relationship with a man on Tuesday, and perhaps on Wednesday have both together (admittedly you have to be in good condition for this).” The hip smile with gratification at this; the square chuckle nervously (he is kidding, isn’t he?). Having often noted the American dearth of irony, Vidal knows how delighted we are by that rarity here, a flirt and a tease.

United States includes a number of pieces that Vidal followers will know from other collections—the ones about the Wise Hack of Hollywood, who helps Vidal find the genesis of today’s best-sellers in yesterday’s movies, and the dim hacks of academe, writing novels for one another to teach and ignoring the intelligent general reader. Here, too, are Vidal’s complaints about the prevalence of hearts and flowers in the American theater (“Love is a warm druggedness, a surrender of the will and the mind to inchoate feelings of Togetherness. Thought is the enemy; any exercise of mind betrays Love, and Love’s vengeance in the theater is terrible, for mind must be broken and made to recant, and then to love Love”); his exegesis of the holy family of politics (“If it is true that in a rough way nations deserve the leadership they get, then a frivolous and apathetic electorate combined with a vain and greedy intellectual establishment will most certainly restore to power the illusion-making Kennedys”); and recollections of such devious but entertaining companions as Tennessee Williams and Anaïs Nin. He defends the educated and civilized rich, deplores the political power of those who just have a lot of money, and, with a mixture of brisk lecture and suggestive insinuation, undermines the myths and assumptions surrounding sexual behavior and legislation. (While invoking a few of his own: Vidal charges that Dr. David Reuben, “as a Jewish patriarch … believes that woman, the lesser vessel, should bear the responsibility” for contraception; woman, as a thinking reed, might reply that when she met a man she could trust as much as herself, she’d let him take the pills. And for Vidal to state that “most men—homo or hetero—given the opportunity to have sex with 500 different people would do so, gladly”—well, it is obvious, if it wasn’t before, that our social spheres have been widely different.)

In the more recent essays, Vidal again discusses contraception, or the lack of it (“I regard with serenity Pope and Ayatollah as the somehow preprogrammed agents of our demise, the fate of every species”); fondly remembers Orson Welles (“He wore bifurcated tents to which, rather idly, lapels, pocket flaps, buttons were attached in order to suggest a conventional suit. … He chuckled and, as always, the blood rose in his face, slowly, from lower lip to forehead until the eyes vanished in a scarlet cloud”); and commends to our attention such overlooked writers as Dawn Powell (“that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final, down payment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life’s feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up”).

Some Vidal traits less attractive than frivolity or condescension are also on display here. Only a twittering ignoramus, sycophant to the star guest at the book-chat cocktail party, would think “Poddy is a silly billy” an effective way of telling off Norman Podhoretz; and only a—well, I leave readers to fill in the adjective and noun—would find it apt for Vidal to remark, when Podhoretz says he is not interested in the Civil War, “I realized then that he was not planning to become an ‘assimilated American,’ to use the old-fashioned terminology; but, rather, his first loyalty would always be to Israel.”

Even we full-time Jews and sometime literal-minded bores, though, can forgive Vidal such lapses for his erudition, his uncompromising wit, and the way he dramatically throws out a poetic flourish as the cape swooshes over his exit. Among the industrious dullards who write so many of our literary essays, and the whining bullies who write political ones, Vidal is a welcome relief and a great star turn: our own combination of George Sanders and Sainte-Beuve.