Every Time a Friend Succeeds, Something Inside Me Dies

The Life of Gore Vidal

Jay Parini (Little, Brown, 480pp, £25, Oldie price £20)

JAY PARINI’S memoir of Gore Vidal received mixed reviews: no one seemed sure if it was a hatchet job or a hagiography. Certainly, the waspish and egotistic Vidal lived a life that could run into many volumes. Duncan White in the Daily Telegraph noted: ‘By the age of 25, Vidal had written five novels, bought a huge pile on the Hudson River and claimed to have had more than a thousand sexual partners. He had served on a transport ship in the Aleutian Islands during the war and then, in The City and the Pillar, written one of the most important gay novels of the 20th century while living in an old convent in Guatemala.’

John Carey, in the Sunday Times, found the book ‘compelling’ reading with ‘gem-like vignettes recalling moments in their friendship, some tragic, some comic’. Carey thought Parini did justice to Vidal’s literary legacy but Daisy Goodwin in the Times wondered if his work would mean anything to anyone under 40: ‘It is unfortunate that his last appearance on television was as one of Ali G’s spoof interviews. After the show was broadcast, Vidal told Parini that “British television was finished, completely finished.” He didn’t get it that, after a lifetime of provocation and satire, the joke was now on him.’

Rachel Cooke in the Observer didn’t think Parini dug out anything new, was too ‘awed’ even to fall out with Vidal (something of an achievement). ‘His talk of his closeness to Vidal soon starts to seem like something of an exaggeration. By his own telling, Parini played a rather courtly role in Vidal’s glorious realm.’

In the Evening Standard, Mark Sanderson thought him a ‘bargain-basement Boswell’ but, like most reviewers, he still enjoyed the ride: ‘Parini has painted a portrait (with rectal polyps and all) that is by turns shocking, witty and very funny — just like the muchmissed man himself.’