Valediction
In his second memoir, Point to Point Navigation, the 80-year-old Gore Vidal is in a valedictory mood, recalling departed friends and especially his longtime partner Howard Auster, as well as anticipating his own demise. The morbidity is undercut by Vidal's wit, unsentimental restraint, and style. His portraits of playwright Tennessee Williams--the "Glorious Bird"--Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart and novelist Paul Bowles are unforgettable. At the same time Vidal favors the vignette here, so the memoir has a haphazard quality. Ostensibly a sequel to Palimpsest, the memoir's penultimate revelation isn't personal at all but a rehashing of JFK assassination theory. Elsewhere Vidal critiques his own biographers. It's fascinating when the author anatomizes his friends' characters, but it's dicey when Vidal challenges Lindbergh's pro-German isolationism on the strength of no more than his patrician insider status. In addition the memoir frustrates when Vidal gives the reader only a skeletal x-ray of the 50-year-bond he shared with Auster. In this case one wants to know more, not less.
