High jinks and low jokes in never-land
D.J. Taylor
THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION by Gore Vidal Little, Brown. £16.99, pp. 260 • How do the books you see e ewed get read by their reviewers? Well, I picked up Gore Vidal's new novel at 3.15 last Saturday afternoon as the train sped out of Paddington en route for the Cheltenham Literary Festival. At 3.45 I somewhat wanly put it back in the bag and substituted Craig Brown's new book of parodies. Seven hours later, in a chintzy hotel room, I picked it up again and man- aged to hang on for at least ten minutes before falling asleep. 7.45 the next morn- ing, as the early sun shone over the distant car ' parks, found me having another try, before breakfast became an urgent necessi- ty. And so on, through the return train ride, the tube journey back to Putney and a long 'working' evening. Finally I finished the wretched thing — and The Smithsonian Institution is not a long novel — late on Sunday night.
The case against Gore Vidal's fiction was memorably stated over 20 years ago by the young Martin Amis. Having interviewed Vidal in Ravello, Amis found that his sub- ject had followed him back to England. Prudently, he took a draft of his article round to the Connaught where the affable Mr Vidal volunteered to correct it. A few chance scurrilities hastily excised, a gener- ally approving Vidal remarked that it was a bit thin on 'the works'. Alas, Amis con- fessed — in print, if not to his host's face — an admirer of the essays he might be, but the novels . . . well, life was just too short.
I remembered that interview (reprinted in The Moronic Inferno, 1986) at about the time the train reached Reading. The Smithsonian Institution is one of those increasingly fashionable high-jinks-with- history novels, set in the run-up to the sec- ond world war, in which a precocious (sex and intellect) 13-year-old-boy is bidden to turn up at Pennsylvania Avenue on a day when he knows the place to be closed. Here, after various preliminaries — includ- ing some dalliance with a 'white' squaw from the Early Indian Exhibition — 'T', as the boy is known, is inducted by Abraham Lincoln into the Manhattan Project, which is going on in the basement.
Nuclear fission aside, T is immediately caught up in some purposeful experiments with the time-space continuum aimed at preventing the outbreak of war (having dis- covered that it looks set to cause his own death, T is more than happy to help). The nuclear physics stuff is painstakingly inked in, but it seems to be summarised in his realisation that
the four-dimensional co-ordinates of time- space were suddenly clear to him. Once he had the energy to transfer mass, himself, he could not so much enter as cross over into one of innumerable parallel pasts.
Meanwhile 'Squaw' (who turns out to be the wife of President Cleveland), when not ravishing him senseless, proves a merry guide to the exhibits (We're pretty lively when we're not on display') and suggests an intervention or two on the tape of past time. T may not be able to do much about, say, the Depression, but he could perhaps interfere with the chain of contingency that led to Woodrow Wilson becoming presi- dent.
H. G. Wells would have given this kind of thing excitement, ardour and intellectual rigour. Vidal, being Vidal, imparts only a sort of sophisticated smirking, whose prime giggle is what the exhibits get up to after dark ('Black slave girls, Eskimos are con- sidered really hot,' a 19th-century army officer explains. 'And of course they all like the idea of going with a president, any president, in fact.') In the end, despite an ingenious solution to the problem of T's impending death and one or two decent jokes — in particular the presidents' habit of sitting around reading the latest biogra- phies of themselves — I put down The Smithsonian Institution for the last time with a feeling of profound annoyance. No doubt Mr Vidal is one of the grandest of transatlantic literary panjandrums, but how do books like this get published? And what publisher, given the choice between this thrumming opus and a couple of manuscripts by talented newcomers press- ing for a hearing, could possibly plump for T and his high-jinks in historical never- land?
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