For Vidal’s imagination has always operated most vividly upon the past. Einfühlen is the word he has used, borrowing it from the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder. In a 1999 interview, Vidal defined it as “an ability to get into the past, while realizing that it’s not just another aspect of the present, with people you know dressed up in funny clothes.” The present, especially in his fiction, sometimes hobbled him. The past — the pageant in the rearview mirror — gave free rein to his archeological brand of empathy with compulsively readable results.
But not, alas, this time. Despite some exquisite passages and frisky prose, “Point to Point Navigation” betrays a diminishing attention span. There are sentences so sloppy that I never would have attributed them to a spit-and-polish stylist like Vidal. There are clanging redundancies, including entire paragraphs lifted almost directly from “Palimpsest.” Nor can he resist kicking his biographer, Fred Kaplan, in the shins whenever the impulse seizes him.
That’s not the worst of it. It’s bad enough when the author turns over the microphone to a pair of his academic exegetes — one of whom helpfully informs us that Vidal “exploits the congruencies among critiques of genetic, genital, and technological determinism.” (Help!) But when one of our greatest living critics reprints a Publishers Weekly précis of a book rather than summarizing it himself, it’s really time to throw in the towel. Shame on the publisher for wheeling this subpar product into the marketplace.
As for the 81-year-old Vidal, I hope he’ll sail on to his centennial and beyond — and that he’ll go out on a more distinguished note than this one. He certainly has earned it.
more from the LA Times here.