Turns out Moms & PBS were right: Reading is fundamental — to democratic stability. Neo-fascist leaders and their movements are ever more prevalent and powerful in 2026 because so-called low-education voters are ever more prevalent and easily led. These are the constituents famously preferred by Donald Trump. Yet these voters are proliferating worldwide, because the technological conditions that have created our 21st century literacy deficit — social media platforms newly super-charged by machine learning — are global.
We Americans often shovel these folks into a “non-college educated” bucket. During the last decade, however, smartphones — our 24/7 gateways to AI-enhanced social media algorithms — have hacked our behaviors in broader, more dangerous ways that have greatly expanded this suggestible-voter category.
In the U.S. specifically, a 2025 study in iScience found that pleasure reading fell 40 percent from 2003 to 2023. Non-audio/visual news consumption are both declining — according to Americans news consumers themselves. Effective literacy is shrinking globally but only in so-called first-world nations, where internet and smartphone usage are highest. Even the recently college-educated cannot complete nor comprehend entire books today, or so their professors report. Attention spans and critical thinking skills have attenuated in concert.
We readers and would-be readers are instead ever more reliant on watching or listening. Myself included.
Old school authoritarians hate readers. They love listeners and watchers.
As humans around the world read less — less often, less well — we are, all of us, more susceptible to the power dynamics that political leaders once deployed in pre-literate times, for millennia ahead of the Enlightenment. Trump is medieval in so many ways: the naked patronage, his championing of a Christian faith he does not follow. But Trump is cunning, as primitive leaders proved cunning. High walls don’t control immigrant populations. But they impress illiterate peasants as signs of strength and safety.
As literacy wanes, as cognitive and social behaviors related to reading wane, we are witnessing leadership styles respond and devolve. We refer to these newly empowered leaders as authoritarians or fascists; their communication capabilities feel new. In fact, they’re drawing upon age-old, foundational elements of power acquisition and maintenance, tools devised to dominate pre-literate cultures: fear stemming from the assertion of raw power and violence, personal charisma, symbolism, and xenophobic rhetoric.
Reading Resists Medieval Politics
It’s possible that humans will adapt, or democracies will eventually gird themselves to better resist these demagogues who have leveraged new technological realities. Early returns don’t look so promising.
The more reasonable assumption: Modern democracies simply cannot function without a preponderance of informed, literate citizens who can effectively process and parse written information. On the eve of an American Bisesquicentennial, it seems relevant to point out that the U.S. democratic project, in particular, would not have been established 250 years ago without broad-based literacy among its 18th century citizens.
Colonial thought-leaders like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, “founders” like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (dedicated pamphleteers in their own right), argued as much. In print. They were agreed on this point because the Enlightenment thinkers they revered, figures like David Hume and John Locke, believed self-government was not possible without literate populations. They, too, established that stipulation, in print.
On July 3, 1776, Great Britain’s North American colonies were among of the most literate communities in the history of mankind. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), average literacy for white men in the late-colonial period was roughly 70% to 90%, while white women averaged 45% to 50%.
There is historical fiction. There are the literary cousins of memoir and family history. Then there is the canny, lyric hybrid Elizabeth Graver conjures in Kantika, the 2023 novel that tracks her own family’s 20th-century journey from Constantinople to America, by way of Barcelona and Havana.
Don’t worry: Ellis Island and its many literary tropes do not figure here. Those are generally reserved for Eastern Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews. Graver’s people are the decidedly Mediterranean, metropolitan and mercantile Sephardic Jews, first invited to the Ottoman capital by Sultan Bayezid II, in 1492, following the Christian Reconquista of Spain.
Four centuries on, the author introduces her great grandfather, the cultured, haute bourgeoisie owner of a textile concern, until he isn’t. After retooling his factory during The Great War, to produce military uniforms, the new Turkish government absconds with the business. Or so Alberto Cohen tells his wife and children.
Did Ataturk really take their livelihoods and social standing by eminent domain? Or did this charming-but-passive sensualist fritter or perhaps gamble it away instead? Such questions are rarely meted out for certain, not in real life, not within families, certainly not looking back across generations. Graver is unflinching in her fleshing and framing of such consequential gossip. Yet the novelist can also absolve or blame or leave ambiguous all the saucy or ambivalent bits, pretty much at her whim. To the narrative’s great benefit.
Fiction Reveals Grandma as Go-Getter
And so Rebecca — our protagonist, the author’s maternal grandmother — decamps with her penniless relations for Barcelona, just as she comes of age. There she marries a largely absent dullard because four centuries after the Inquisition, in what would shortly become Franco’s Spain, Sephardic men are hard to find. She builds a business and bears two children, only to be widowed at 30. Her older sister, already emigrated to the U.S., makes her a speculative, trans-Atlantic match with another widower, Sam Levy, whom Rebecca meets in Havana. As a test. Twenty-four lusty hours later they are married and aboard a boat bound for New York City.
Stories of American immigration tend to concentrate less on the old country, where conditions obliged one to light out for new territory in the first place. I am grateful that more than half of Kantika is set abroad because not everyone in a family might choose to emigrate, or is allowed to. Rebecca waits two years for her boys to join her in America, for example; her aged parents expire before their papers & passages are secured.
What’s more, the folks who do manage to leave tend to self-select according to their strength of self, adventure and determination. To some extent, these metrics account for the can-do immigrant spirit that has, in large part, made the U.S. what it is. After the same fashion, it enabled and informed the distinct culture of the American West.
In short, the sad sacks tend to stay home. The same goes for those immigrants who get dragged to a new world and never leave the old neighborhood. (In Greater Boston, where I grew up, they have a name for those folks: The Lace-Curtain Irish.)
There are plenty of sad sacks in the Cohen family, in any family, and this story does not ignore or pigeon-hole them. But Rebecca is determinedly bound not necessarily for bigger things but the next thing, all the while singing and cajoling, striving and faltering, dusting herself off and risking it all again. America and its celebrated dreams do not magically lift her blended family out of working-class hardship. In several not-insignificant respects, she was sold a bill of goods (by her sister!). Yet Graver still depicts Depression-era Queens and this new, extended family with a clear-eyed, richly detailed generosity that feels deserved.
So, what made Grandma Grandma?
The Cohens and Levys will never be confused with the high society Sephardim of Steven Birmingham’s esteemed 1971 history, The Grandees. But neither did he create characters as earthy and captivating as Rebecca. Working in non-fiction, he didn’t create them at all. The humans who populate Kantika, while technically the fabrications of a novelist, nevertheless feel markedly genuine — because, in these pages, the reader recognizes them as actual historical figures, relatives and literary characters all at once. This genre Graver cleverly contrives here. It can’t be her own invention, can it?
Either way, her sketches of fin de siècle life by the Bosphorus, the portraits of her great grandparents in particular, and the language of those newly arrived in Barcelona, then the boroughs of Gotham, all ring very true. As do the black & white photographs that headline the chapters. I took the time to study each one, delighting in my recognition of these blood relations we’ve come to know via the unfolding drama.
These components and others all deliver such splendid narrative impact because, it seems to me, they strike the reader as more authentic and intimate than mere details in a work of fiction, while never succumbing to the gloss of memoir or family history. Because the author is clearly moved by the epic sweep of this tale, so are we.
The word “kantika” means “song” in the old Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino, the accent of which Rebecca never shakes. One imagines that Graver herself — a Boston College professor whose 2013 novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the National Book Award — was enthralled by her grandmother growing up. And perhaps a bit intimidated by such a robust, borderline domineering, still-rather-foreign figure.
Graver and I attended Wesleyan University together in the mid-1980s; we didn’t really know each other, but we did share several English classes. Perhaps the cynical, white-bread nature of the New England small college initially led her to dismiss as mere mythos her grandmother’s literary potential. Credit the free-thinking Jesuits in Chestnut Hill and maybe a tenure track for leading her back to subject matter, a legit heroine’s journey, that was there all along.
The inimitable Bob Barker, flanked by “Price is Right” eye candy Janice Pennington (left) and Anita Ford.
As yours probably does, my alma mater hits me all too frequently with some manner of e-newsletter cum fund-raising communiqué. One can hardly escape the memories stirred/jarred by all this WesContact, which is surely the way they want it. In any case, a recent MailChimp morsel revealed, among other things, that three Wesleyan University faculty, among them Nat Greene, had received The Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. While this particular tidbit proved interesting enough to peruse, I’m only now addressing the nostalgia it prompted — immersed as I am, third party, in the college experience of both my kids.
The first thing to say is that my cohort and I attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., alongside an actual Binswanger — Benjamin Pennypacker Binswanger to be exact. Never knew him but my housemates and I made note of his titanically pretentious name the first week of school freshman year and never forgot it. Never tired of mocking it, either. Always wondered if he was related to Princeton’s Jay Binswanger, winner of the first Heisman Trophy…
Wesleyan Professor Nat Greene
More to the point, Nat Greene was one of these recent Binswanger honorees. I took a couple classes with him but the first was a survey of European history 1815-1945, and I remember it best because it was the only class I ever took with my housemate Dennis Carboni, an art history major whose course load never again overlapped with mine (classical history/modern American lit).
Greene didn’t necessarily tilt the material toward “social” history, an approach then sweeping uber-liberal bastions like Wesleyan. His hewed more to the traditional “Great Men, Great Events” approach. I remember the syllabus included a book of his own scholarship, “From Versailles to Vichy: The Third French Republic, 1919–1940”, which a) struck me at the time as being pretty awesome, that this guy was teaching from his own work; and b) still resides in a bookcase somewhere here in my house, for reasons completely bewildering to my wife. An entertaining lecturer and no-nonsense grader of essays (all testing was conducted via manic, long-hand scribbling in those little blue booklets), Greene was a fine professor, the sort I hope Silas and Clara will experience at some point in their academic careers.
Nat Green Class at 10, Price is Right at 11
But here’s what I remember most from my class with Nat Greene: It ran from 10 to 10:50 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings in the old PAC building — a few steps from the manhole where we often plunged down into Wesleyan’s famous tunnel system, the subject of another remembrance perhaps. If Dennis and I didn’t dawdle after class, we could race home to my off-campus apartment and catch The Price Is Rightat 11 a.m.
Yes, The Price Is Right. It became a sort of ironic obsession for me but something more than that for Dennis, as many things did. It gave me great pleasure to watch him obsessively game this once-seminal game show.
I’m not sure that college kids go in for this sort of thing today, awash as they are in video content and on-demand entertainment delivery choices. However, during the early 1980s, TV was a sort of novel diversion for college kids. We had grown up with it, of course, but had virtually no access to it at school. And so, great delight was taken in the ironic devotion to retrograde programming like soap operas in dorm lounges and late-night reruns of shows like the Rockford Files and Star Trek — things we would never bother watching when home with our families. My sophomore year, my housemate and I came by a tiny black-and-white TV that I’m pretty sure we carried with us the next three years, to three different houses, deploying along the way a staggering array of make-shift aerials including one that involved a pumpkin wrapped in aluminum foil.
The Price is Right fell right into this determinedly low-brow TV consumption, representing, as it did, all that was bourgeois and mass cultural — a great pleasure following high-blown, Nat Greene-led discussions of Marx, Captain Swing and Bismarck’s deft wrangling of German principalities. While Dennis’ note-taking habits at the knee of Professor Green were notoriously suspect, Bob Barker proved another matter entirely. While watching the show, Dennis kept copious notes on the price of every consumer item so that he might later blurt out a winning price before any of the three official contestants. When some dishwasher was revealed from behind the curtain, Dennis would browse his cheat sheet while everyone else in the studio cooed with consumerist abandon (take that, Karl!).
“Whirlpool, eh? That’s upmarket,” Dennis would muse strategically. “I’m going with $538.”
And invariably, it was so — or near enough that Dennis would have earned, in our demented fantasy world, the right to bound up on stage to mug with Barker at close quarters.
Our College/Young Adult Families
I heard an interesting interview a few years ago with writer/director Noah Baumbach and his partner Greta Gerwig, star of his movie, Frances Ha. Gerwig, then 28, talked about how several characters she’s played on screen ]stumble through their mid-20s in an unhinged emotional state — not necessarily because of new adult demands being foisted upon them, but rather because the surrogate families all 20somethings create for themselves at college (and just afterward) invariably fall away, sometimes bit by bit, but always in ways that unmoor. I remember this dynamic: We gathered these people upon leaving our actual families, and Gerwig explained that she was completely taken aback when close college and post-collegiate friends moved away, took jobs that contravened all she had assumed they stood for, or married someone whose presence effectively severed or weakened these bonds — bonds that young, college-educated folk believe are strong and meaningful enough to last forever.
I find Gerwig’s observation to be spot on. I remain close to several friends from college and that immediate-post collegiate period, including Dennis, but many more did fall away over time for reasons that were surely legitimate but felt to me, at the time, like a sort of casual betrayal. I mean, these were people I lived with, for years — they contributed to the shaping of me and presumably I reciprocated in some way. It makes one value all the more those who’ve not fallen away, but it also makes one sad and wistful that all we have to show for these folks, now lost, are weirdly disconnected memories, the odd anecdote, and persistent wonder as to whom they turned out to be.
I stay in pretty good touch with Dennis but there are probably a dozen others I haven’t spoken to for many years now. I wonder how they’re doing, beyond the superficial info I might gather on Facebook (were they, or I, to indulge in such a thing). If we tripped over each other somewhere, would we trade grand truths? Would we trade Nat Greene recollections or their equivalents before falling into the banter we perfected and found so very absorbing all those years ago?
I wonder… Until then:
Johnny, tell him what he’s won…
A NEW CAR!
The 11th at Royal St. David's (photo courtesy of Brandon Tucker/WorldGolf.com)
Royal St. David’s Golf Club and its singular Welsh backdrop, Harlech Castle
HARLECH, Wales (July 13, 2017) — The British Open is nearly underway and, while there are myriad reasons to visit the U.K. with your golf clubs, none of them have much to do with British Open venues. Look at Wales, located right next door to this year’s host, Royal Birkdale — to all of England, if we’re honest.The R&A has never staged The Open over this border. Still, the golf up and down the northwestern Welsh coast is outstanding. Welsh golf along the south coast ((Royal Porthcawl, Southerndown, Pennard) is even better.
What’s more, when you venture into this section of the British Isles, you experience a region so remote, so removed from modern resort and tournament conventions, that a golf journey there feels almost Arthurian.
A hefty chunk of the King Arthur legend is Welsh, drawn from early poetic sources such as Y Gododdin. Like the Welsh language itself, theses texts pre-date Roman Britain, much less Christianity. The Druids, the UK’s pre-Christian priestly class, considered the Welsh island of Anglesey sacred. This ancient, mystical aura continues to pervade the country’s dark hollows, its untamed coastline, even its trees. The Celts thought them sacred, you know.
I’m a voracious fan of the historical novelist Bernard Cornwell, whose Arthurian trilogy, The Warlord Chronicles (comprising The Winter King, Enemy of God and Excalibur) were all published about during mid-1990s. Taken together, they represent the best, most accurate and compelling take on the Arthurian tales — and much of the three-book saga takes place in Wales.
Indeed, they made a movie loosely based on Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles, in 2004 Alas, the film — titled “King Arthur” and starting Clive Owen and Keira Knightly — proved middling at best. But they filmed all the castle scenes in Harlech.
Welsh Golf: Where Worlds Collide
Here’s an example of how this ancient world and the modern golfing world can interact in the UK’s least heralded golf destination:
About 15 years ago my girlfriend, Sharon, who would later become my wife, and I went to visit friends in Market Drayton, Shropshire, just over the Welsh border, in England, and not far from Birmingham. I was there on assignment, writing a travel piece about “where to play in the Midlands” while attending the 1995 Ryder Cup.
We can see what sort of long-term promotional effect that story had: To this day, no one talks about Edgbaston, Beau Desert or Hawkstone Park.
Anyway, we decided to head west a couple hours, over the Welsh border to seaside Harlech, home to Royal St. David’s Golf Club. I had written a letter to the club secretary requesting courtesy of the club (remember written, posted letters?). He had kindly obliged. We three arrived in coat and tie, ready for an audience and perhaps a drink in the bar before teeing off.
Ahead of our game, however, we stashed our clubs in the boot and walked a few hundred meters up the hill from RSDGC to Harlech Castle, which overlooks the course, the town and the entire countryside. Built by King Edward I during his late-thirteenth century conquest of Wales, it served as de facto capital of an independent Wales between 1404 and 1409. That’s when was held by Owain Glyndwr, the last native Welshman to hold the title Prince of Wales.
Try doing something like that within walking distance at Royal St. George’s.
Impressing the Club Secretary
Sharon was a pretty rank novice back then. She had her own clubs and arrived at the club looking pretty darned smart in a turtleneck and one of my vintage sport jackets with the sleeves rolled up (remember the ‘90s?). Still, the club secretary was dubious. I don’t know whether he suspected her inexperience (none of us were asked to present handicap cards), or he was merely a mild sexist when it came to lassie guests playing his course.
Whatever the case, he followed us to the first tee to witness our opening drives. I’m not sure who was made more nervous by this “gesture,” Sharon or myself — but she proceeded to drill one right down the middle, about 210 yards, and off we went. Come to think of it, that may have been the day I decided she was the one.
In any case, Royal St. David’s was and remains fairly sublime. The opening holes are a bit ordinary and flattish, hidden as they are behind (and not amid) the giant dunes at seaside. But the back nine rollicks through some truly extraordinary dunesland. Great stuff.
Welsh Golf doesn’t have to be — some would argue that it shouldn’t be — about resorts and tourism initiatives and tournament-enabled marketing synergies. It’s about watching your future wife stripe one, after mingling with the spirits of rebel kings and pre-Christian sorcerers in a real, live castle. Not to belabor the point, but they ain’t doing that at Birkdale.
The 11th at Royal St. David’s (photo courtesy of Brandon Tucker)
The book review below, written in 1994, first appeared in The Harold Herald, the blog I created in 1992. The original print issue sought to mimic the look of the NYT Book Review. That effort has been abandoned here, in the name of SEO. Some have argued I invented the blog, pre-Internet. Read more about that claim here.
THE HAROLD HERALD BOOK REVIEW
Vidal’s Historical Fiction Pegs Ambition as Historical Catalyst
Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington D.C. byGore Vidal. Ballantine Press, $5.95 ea.
By all rights, Aaron Burr should have been the third president of the United States. If not the third, then certainly the fourth. When he and Thomas Jefferson secured the identical number of electoral votes following the election of 1800, Burr stood aside. He accepted the vice presidency and bided his time. The presidency would fall to him eventually. Hadn’t John Adams set the executive precedent by accepting the second spot, then ascending in due course? Hadn’t Jefferson promised his support when the time came?
But Jefferson would prove unfailingly vague when it came to political commitments. He was wary of Burr and isolated the vice president within his Cabinet. Jefferson wouldn’t allow Burr to resign with honor — until, that is, Burr hadn’t the time to organize a credible campaign for 1804. Jefferson then framed Burr for treason and the government tried him. The trumped-up charges failed to convince a jury, but Burr’s political viability had been effectively obliterated. Thus Jefferson securing his own and, by naming James Madison vice president, a Virginian ascension.
At least, that’s Burr’s version of events.
Or rather, that’s the version laid out by Gore Vidal’s title character in “Burr,” the first of six historical novels comprising the author’s so-called American Chronicle. I started this jourjney in August and have finally finished.
By tracking Aaron Burr and his descendants through the nation’s first 150 years, Vidal illustrates how ambition shaped and sustained the world’s first modern democracy. Ambition and naked political scheming. At the same time Vidal weaves an enormously intricate, believable tapestry where historic figures full of life mingle with equally engaging but fictional offspring.
Vidal’s Historical Fiction is Heroically Researched
Vidal has clearly done a vast amount of homework. His is an authority born of journals, letters and historical canon. Yet Vidal’s real characters — like Jefferson and William Seward, Lincoln’s ambitious secretary of state — prove unfailingly funny, sullen, outrageous, randy, paranoid and sometimes insane. In a word, human. Indeed, they take on the qualities of fictional characters because Vidal depicts them with such depth, wit and humanity. On scholarly grounds, historians wouldn’t dare recreate dialogue as Vidal has done. Besides, most historians couldn’t do it; they haven’t his skills as a novelist. Vidal can convincingly mimic Henry Adams and Mrs. John Jacob Astor, with equal parts style and integrity. Because he’s a writer of fiction with supreme command of the subject matter.
When Vidal intersperses these historical figures with fictional characters (believably placed in the maelstrom of actual events), it’s hard to remember who’s real and who’s not. The author does his level best to remove any distinction. The reader cannot put it down.
Young Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a fictional law clerk and budding journalist, tells the story of “Burr”. Schuyler works for the title character and convinces the old man to dictate his fascinating memoir. This Burr does, in part. The bits and pieces of his amazing life — the raid on Quebec with Benedict Arnold, candid Burr-centric portrayals of all the founding fathers, his aborted conquest of Mexico, his many wives, his mysterious relationship with Martin van Buren, rumored to be Burr’s bastard son — are never published as memoir, per se. They appear only as flashbacks set against Burr and Schuyler’s “contemporary” story, set in the 1830s. The young protégé provds mesmerized by this window on the nation’s founding moments and men. He is fairly well knocked to the floor when, upon the old man’s death, Schuyler learns that he, too, is Burr’s illegitimate son.
The Interwining of Real & Imaginary Figures
In “Lincoln,” volume II in the series, Schuyler disappears and Vidal centers the novel around two historical figures: the president and his young secretary, John Hay, who narrates. Schuyler reappears very late in “Lincoln” before resuming his own narrative in the third volume, “1876.” Here Schuyler and his daughter hitch their political wagons to the shoo-in presidential candidate, Samuel Tilden, and their social fortunes to New York’s budding Astor-based society.
At the beginning of “Empire,” Hay, now President McKinley’s secretary of state, returns as one of Vidal’s central/narrative characters. He does so alongside the fictional Schuyler’s two equally fictional but compelling grandchildren, Caroline and Blaise Sanford. Secretary Hay becomes Teddy Roosevelt’s vice president upon McKinley’s assassination. Blaise becomes William Randolph Hearst’s dilettante protégé. Sister Caroline — a former schoolmate of Eleanor Roosevelt in England — buys the fictional Washington Tribune, where she out-tabloids both Hearst and her jealous brother.
“Hollywood” follows Caroline to California, where she helps pioneer the movie industry (with Hearst). Blaise buys the Tribune and remains in D.C. to savage President Wilson — and back the serenely dim, Republican hopeful, Warren Harding. In the closing novel, “Washington, D.C.,” Blaise presents as an aging, would-be kingmaker frustrated by FDR’s stranglehold on the body politic. The nation’s capital — a malaria-ravaged swampland in “Burr”; a provincial seat of government in “1876”; now, in 1945, nerve center of the world’s first superpower — has changed. But it remains a fascinating backdrop for Vidal’s horde of schemers and climbers. In other words, all the folks who’ve made this country what it is today.
Imbued, as I am, with the arrogant notion that scholarly history is interesting enough (blame the Wesleyan history department), I’ve never been a fan of historical novels. Though I’ve always liked Mary Renault (“The Persian Boy”, “Mask of Apollo”), the genre allows too many liberties. Basically, it’s cheating.
Vidal changed my mind. Well, he didn’t change it… Vidal proves it can be done well, even raised to high art. But good luck finding another author so capable.
Author’s Note: On Other Capables
Ed. September 2014 — So, I found this piece in an online issue of the HaroldHerald, the proto-blog I published via Pagemaker, a Xerox MFM and the U.S. Postal Service in 1994. Disappointed I can’t find the ancient “print” version, as I recall spending a lot of time laying it out to make it look exactly like a NYTimes Book Review page. In any case, it remains an odd mix of fascination and dread to read oneself from 20 years ago, especially as I happen to be rereading “1876” right now.
I back most everything I wrote here, save the last bit. I have, in the ensuing decades, found several historical novelists the equal of Vidal, but only in certain respects. Bernard Cornwell — he of the Sharpe’s Rifles series, set in Napoleonic times; his Arthurian trilogy; and several more multiple-volume depictions (of England in the of time Alfred, France in the middle ages, and even America during the Civil War) — is a thoroughly trustworthy historian and expert yarn-spinner. But he cannot write like Vidal. Few can.
Renault is fabulous but Vidal’s “Julian”, which I read after tapping out the above review, beats Mary in her own classical backyard. Hilary Mantel’s 21st Century series starring Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII (“Wolf Hall” and “Bring up the Bodies” are to be capped by a soon-to-be-released third book) is superb. But she needs a few more under her belt, ideally something from a completely different era, to hang with Vidal. Her very first historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, tracks the men behind the French Revolution. From birth. It’s very good good but not on the level of Wolf Hall.
The best moments in any good historical novel are when the author introduces and puts to lengthy narrative use juicy historical characters. By that I mean rendering them and their interactions with fictional characters. When done well, this exercise can be thrilling. This might happen a half dozen times in any Cornwell novel. In “1876”, it happens every 15 pages: Grant, Mark Twain, Maine’s own James Blaine, James Garfield, an array of New York newspaper editors and publishers, The Astors, Samuel Tilden, even Chester A. Arthur for chrissakes.
The density of Vidal‘s non-fictional characters is dizzying. He delights in painting familiar icons in ways that deconstruct our modern preconceptions while remaining entirely plausible, not to mention historically accurate. This is some of what makes Mantel such a formidable player in the genre. She similarly packs her novels with historical figures, fascinatingly rendered. It’s something her relatively modern subject matter (and our familiarity with many of her non-fiction characters) allows.
The piece de resistance of any historical novel, I’ve learned, is the author’s note at book’s close. Not all of these are handled the same way, but typically the author details all the research they’ve done beside the liberties he/she may or may not have taken with historical events and personages. Invariably, they are minimal; it’s in the author’s interest to give that impression. Oftentimes they’ll get into their sourcing, their bibliography, for the same reasons. Either way, these notes make clear that extraordinary research required, alongside their abilities as storytellers to integrate that data. In the author’s note for Burr, Vidal dazzles in the service of simplicity:“Everything depicted here is historically accurate; everything the non-fictional characters are quoted to have said was taken directly from primary sources, i.e. their letters, correspondence and memoirs.”
I just skipped ahead last night to the Author’s Note for “1876”. It’s similarly brief. History obliged Vidal to move publication of “Huckleberry Finn,” apparently. He wanted this new classic of American literaturediscussed during Twain’s dinner at Delmonico’s with Schuyler in June 1876. Similarly, the massacre at Little Bighorn happened in July, but word of it didn’t reach back East for several weeks. Vidal wanted it in the air at the Republican convention in July, so he took that liberty. But that’s it. Everything else fits together like a sprawling Roman floor mosaic, the sweep of history accented here and there by bits of zhiny, fictional color.
What I didn’t know in 1994 was that Vidal wrote these books out of order, as it were. “Washington D.C” came first (published in 1967), followed by “Burr”, “1876”, “Lincoln”, “Empire” and “Hollywood”. What I could not have known back then was that he would add a seventh volume, “The Golden Age”, that chronicles America during the Cold War. In this coda, Vidal takes us right up to the year 2000 (the year it was published).
Come the millennium, the original thesis laid out in the very first book and supported throughout the series — that America’s republic, always built on the not particularly reliable or durable foundations of corruption, ambition, scheming and privilege, would with the close of WWII, finally give way to outright empire — had indeed come to pass. “The Golden Age” features the broad cast of historical characters any reader of the Chronicle might expect, plus one that comes as a mind-bending but pleasant surprise: Gore Vidal himself.
Vidal never cottoned to calling this series his American Chronicle. That came from the publisher apparently. He preferred Narratives of Empire. Today, one understands why.
