Character Drama in Washington, my review of Gore Vidal’s Washington D.C
I’ve fallen into the habit of reading authors who have recently died. I don’t know why this is. Gore Vidal, for example, I’d put off as too literary until he died last week. Then I read Washington D.C., his fifth in a series of six novels chronicling American Political history.
The novel is billed as a political novel, and this is where I find issue.
Washington D.C. introduces us to an elderly senator, concerned with philosophy, morality, and, incongruously, winning his next election. We are also introduced to the senators morally bankrupt aid, who will do whatever it takes to win a congressional seat, the senator’s daughter, who is in love with the aid, a rich aimless sun of a newspaper publisher, and his sister, who opens the novel by fucking the aid in a pool house.
The novel begins in 1937 and ends in 1950.
The plot, such as it is, involves a lobbiest offering the senator a bribe, the senators aid spurning the senators daughter in favor of the newspapers suns sister, and the looming world war.
Vidal’s prose is for the most part flawless, or at least whatever flaws exist are beyond my ability to detect them. The exceptions are several shockingly lazy sentences which stand out for there ability to jar you right out of the book through ham-handed exposition which Vidal usually handles in a more subtle way. ”
Blaise was bewildered; he was also angry that Clay chose not to confide in him. But Clay had no intention of confiding in anyone.”
. Its as though Vidal’s editor skipped every fiftieth page, allowing awful sentences to sneak into the final draft which is mostly composed of the type of writing that makes me jealous. This is a miner gripe, and doesn’t detract from the work.
We run into trouble, however, when calling Washington D.C. a political novel.
Historical figures hide from us between the lines. Both presidents of the time period, Truman and FDR, plus their respective cabinets are right on the sidelines and Vidal spends the novel tantalizing us with glimpses of them.
They are characters off page, shown only in how the main characters react to what they choose to do.
This, unfortunately, characterizes the novel as a hole.
There are many scenes in the senate cloakroom, and many scenes in the Senator’s office, and many scenes where grand political theater has just happened, or is about to happen, but whenever we get close to witnessing one of these historical or political events, our focus is whisked away, back to domestic or personal drama.
The senator, the rich kid, and the senators aid are so captivated by there own personal drama’s that they rarely look up to view the city around them.
Similarly, the great events which take place from 37 to 50 are shown only in how they effect the characters involved.
This does not hurt the narrative itself, but considering Vidal wrote the novel to illustrate politics, the severe lack of it left me cold.
Certainly this may be an issue of values dissidents.
I hate spoiling books, which makes them difficult to review. But what I’m about to describe happens in the first fifty pages.
The senator is offered a big bribe. He wants to run for president. His struggle over the money provides the first few steps of the plot.
Politics is discussed mostly from a perspective of amorality, the senator admits to himself that among his colleagues bribery is as common as grass. The senators aid is lacking utterly in political principal, but, considering the events of the novel are cast at such a remove from the history taking place at the same time no one gets much of an opportunity to comment on them. This may have been the point.
We are nonetheless confronted with the fact that although allegedly about politics, the novel is really a slice of life kind of thing which uses politics to tell a story which is not primarily a political one.
There is evidence of social change, in one scene where women begin to do the factory jobs that men once did, and in a subplot where a Jew struggles for entry to a social circle whose members hate her on reflex, but towards the end of the novel, when the senator is speaking to an old friend and the friend mentions how different the city is, all I thought as a reader was, “it’d have been nice to see that.”
The aforementioned values dissonance comes from our conception of politicians verses how they may have been perceived in 1967, when Washington D.C. was published.
Post Watergate, post Vietnam, post political action comities, the American people take sleaze and moral bankruptcy for granted. Political history could easily be titled a history of moral lapse with a few laudable and conditional exceptions.
But back in the day politicians, so I hear, were venerated and thought to be morally upright despite reality.
This change in our implicit assumptions of, to name one example, what is the average senator like, may have sapped some of the novels punch, because Vidal makes the point that most of them are up to their ears in corruption which is something I already knew.
The character of the newspaper publishers sun gives us the closest thing we have to political commentary. He fights against the Washington culture, hates the legislative aid, first for a variety of personal reasons, who, spoilers, wins his election to congress. Secondarily the newspaper publishers sun hates the congressman because he’s a calculated politician, using poles to take the most popular positions, going along to get along, as so many do, and Vidal uses the suns hate of the congressman to speak against the increasing roll of good looks and babble which substitute for real discussion of policy.
Because Washington, D.C. was written before the rise of Ragon and our modern campaigns made up of quick televised sound bites and political advertising, this part of the novel is amazingly prescient, its almost too prescient because its complaints have been subsumed by a much harsher reality.
However, if you approach Washington as another literary novel, a family chronicle, a character study, a slice of life, mad men from the forties with all the scenes having to do with Madison avenue cut down to eight seconds, then you will enjoy it. The novel deals with the upper classes, and those parts of Washington they frequent, ballrooms, garden parties and that kind of thing. These period settings are rendered vividly, and the way the characters speak to one another and maneuver for social eminence and discuss the political figures of the day with a jaded perspective are all things in the novels favor.
While not a political novel, political events Vidal lets us glimpse briefly do move the plot forward. That plot, while not what you were expecting is gripping because Vidal has a firm conception of his characters, an ear for dialogue, and engaging prose.
You will go into Washington DC with a certain amount of knowledge about the period 1939 to 1950, and you will finish the novel with the same amount of knowledge because it is only set in that time, not so much about the central events of that time. But once this is understood, and your expectations are altered, Washington, D.C. is the kind of literary fiction you’ve come to expect. There are affairs, witty writing, a little bit of melodrama substance abuse, and discussions of the human condition. Enjoy.
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