These crime novels are not self-consciously deep-or even conventionally good at giving the thrill of a case well solved-though they are certainly eager to show that they know things. But that analysis was only possible because Vidal had been writing a trilogy of crime novels in secret, under the pen name Edgar Box-and already following some of his own advice. To any status-wise observer of the publishing world at the time, Vidal’s Nation piece must have sounded like a howl voiced from some bitter and lonely remove. Vidal’s next novel under his own name, “Julian,” would not emerge until six years after this essay, while his prior effort, “Messiah,” had come out all the way back in 1954. In his closing paragraph, he went on to propose an alternative: not “a good novel about the wool trade or building a dam,” but rather a renaissance of the satiric approach, in a decade Vidal saw as begging to be held up to that form of scrutiny. Naturally, Vidal couldn’t let this know-nothing party of well-regarded writers have the last word in his essay. We are deep of course, often mystic, and we do know that love and compassion are the most beautiful things in the world and in our studies of loneliness we like to show the full potentiality of love … but we don’t know or want to know any senators, bishops, atomic scientists as for psychiatrists-well, we like ours: he is a Jungian.” After having diagnosed the “vitiating diffidence” of the nation’s less ambitious authors, Vidal presumed to articulate a mission statement in their voice, which went, in part: “We don’t know very much…. No one was talking about much of anything, at least so far as Vidal could tell-outside of maybe Norman Mailer (of whom Vidal could only report mixed feelings, on the best of days).

program, Vidal offered a few bracing words about the state of the novel in America. Writing for The Nation, in 1958, several decades before the rise of the M.F.A.

Empire by gore vidal