Customer Reviews

Duluth

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Duluth, a wickedly funny satire by Gore Vidal, is the funniest novel I have ever read. It is a satire of 1980's Reagan-era America, and of the rich in particular. However, the reader should be advised that it is not going to make sense, and one should, like I did, just give up on figuring it out, and go along for the ride that Vidal takes us on. It may be absurd, but it is great fun, and I heartily recommend Duluth to anyone looking for a funny novel written in great style.

There is a tremendous amount of violence in this book; the kind of subversively funny violence that makes it a bridge from the violence of Bugs Bunny cartoons of the 1940s to Quentin Tarantino's PULP FICTION and KILL BILL today. And that violence, profoundly enough, like its antecedents and descendents, is not in the plot; it's in the construction, deconstruction and delivery of each line in the novel as a whole. It is that kind of violence that is subversive enough in how it is delivered, in terms of context and irony, that makes this book so important, and, ulitmately, hilarious.

Only someone as well associated with the barbaric hypocrisy of the bourgeousie in American society like the Master Gore Vidal could write a book that reveals it to such maddening detail with such incredible humor. And yet, like an ADD child gone too long without his pills or a self-loathing genius comedian riffing while high on drugs, Vidal refuses to stop there. He begins to contemptuously deconstruct the very art form that is the novel to rip from it the very selfsame pretensions of artistic superiority inherent in it via its destruction--as it has existed for mainly the middle to upper middle classes in the first place. He makes his point that the novel is essentially dead, replaced with movies and the television hour drama as a vehicle for storytelling in the modern world; yet he does it while going off Hollywood television culture, in the context of his many stories. He even goes off on the very self-conscious postmodernistic style of novel writing after Pynchon, while staying true to the character and story development of about six or seven different absurd plots that form the bedrock of this sick but oh so American town named Duluth. Imagine a small, racist, politically corrupt town in the mid West with UFOs, Aztec terrorists who speak like Shakespearean heroes when their Spanish colloquialisms are translated, and people who, when they die, get reincarnated into characters on a television soap opera made about the town itself...and you have about HALF of what is going on in this incredibly silly and profoundly beautiful novel.

Gore Vidal is to Mark Twain what John Coltrane is to Charlie Parker. Read this novel, and see what I mean. Brilliant.

Who else but Gore Vidal can write great historical novels, contemporary essays, and some of the most subversive and hilarious "Comic Novels" out there? He deserves the Nobel Prize, but is too good for it! Anyway, here is a very tall tale about some politicos, police officers, Aztec terrorists in the barricades, and some of the most hilarious comments on 20th century US pseudo-culture you'll ever read. Throw in some real sci-fi with some strange aliens stuck inside some swampland, with multiple US Presidents, and some truly bizarre imaginings, and you have a can't- miss oddball novel that could only be cooked up by a mind like that of the great Gore Vidal!

Only Gore Vidal would conceive a plot about characters being like movie stars and appearing in films, TV shows and other novels when they are off duty in the novel you are reading.

The idea was great, but its execution was flippant and there is gratuituous everything. I stayed with it only to see how he would tie it all up. Had the book been longer, I wouldn't have finished it.

I'm still not sure that I get the significance of Duluth being 9 miles from the Mexican border with a view of Lake Erie, although I have some ideas.

Vidal is a great a writer. Even in this mish mash there are some great ideas and wonderful turns of phrase.

Gore Vidal's metropolis of Duluth is bordered by Louisiana, Mexico, and the Great Lakes, with the Colorado River winding through its precincts and emptying into "palm-lined Lake Erie." On a clear day you might be able to "see the Pacific Ocean from up here"--here being the top of an illegally parked spaceship that contains either Hubert Humphrey or, perhaps, "illegal" aliens (get it?). In other words Vidal concentrates the entire United States into a few dozen square miles, and he similarly distills all our foibles, anxieties, and nonsense (along with political corruption, racial unrest, and cultural ignorance) into a representative handful of the city's denizens.

"Duluth" also spoofs post-structuralism: not only is there a city called Duluth, there are also a novel called "Duluth" and a TV series called "Duluth." Because of the "simultaneity effect" (a corollary of the "relative fictive law"), characters migrate between city, book, and show--and sometimes can appear in "as many fictions as the random may require." Rosemary Kantor, the author of the metafictional Duluths and professional purveyor of malapropisms and cliches, undergoes the usual "trials of authorship" and borrows the "triremes" of authors ranging from Bulwer-Lytton to Georgette Heyer and, when all else fails, resorts to typographic shortcuts. ("'That will get her to France,' says Rosemary, banging out three rows of asterisks.")

Other readers and critics have found in "Duluth" (the one by Vidal, that is) echoes and encores from his previous comic novels: the sexual politics and sadistic acidity of "Myra Breckinridge," the obsession with mass media of "Myron" (as well as the dissolution of the "wall" between television and viewer, between book and reader), and the cultish apocalyptic shenanigans of "Kalki." But I'm afraid that I regard "Duluth" not as a greatest hits anthology but as a collection of B-sides and outtakes: there are some enjoyable surprises, but (bear with me while I kill the metaphor) the episodic remixes, the one-off set pieces, and the cloying riffs never seem to gel into a coherent concept album. That Vidal believes this to be one of his best novels reminds us how Mark Twain insisted upon "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" as his own masterpiece.

True, some of this stuff gets funnier after a little reflection or when it's condensed into summary. But making fun of literary theory and romance authors (even back in the early 1980s) is hardly as cutting-edge as Vidal seems to think, and he continually steps over that fine line between madcap zaniness and flat silliness. Plus, there is the tedious obsession with Golden Age film stars, whose lowbrow presence poisons all Vidal's comic novels in the same way it does Ray Bradbury's. In spite of the abundance of laughs, then, many of the jokes have all the vitality of a bottle of ginger ale left open since the Reagan administration--reminding us that humor doesn't always travel well through space or time, much less on a space ship.

Gore Vidal has written a lot and he has written very well. He has generated a prolific quantity of works while breaching vast historical including eras in historical novels, critical essays, and subversive `comic' novels. Duluth is one of his `comic novels' and he endeavors to be abstruse. The setting is an impossible city named Duluth located between the Michigan and the Mexican border, with a absurd motto proclaimed in neon on its tallest building: ''Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.'' The characters shift among real (`now'), television and printed page. Throw in a mysterious spaceship and you got an esoteric mess. Clearly, he is going out of way to make an objective reality beyond the reader's grasp. Is this intended to be a back-handed salute to post-modernism? That's my bet.

Who's the protagonist? Good luck. Vidal careens among storylines like a soap opera. Just when the suspense reaches a peak, he jumps to another sub-story. No one is really a `hero.' Vidal paints a shallow caricature of everyday life and throws malicious barbs at all classes, whether they live in the barrios or the mansions. Nose jobs are accepted but using your imagination is not. Everyone has vices, usually sexual in nature. In fact, sex in Duluth is like life underwater, you're either the predator or the prey. Sexual prowess (whether consensual or involuntarily) is the tie that binds the characters.

Vidal is a master of word play for dismantling icons and social conventions. As in other novels, a favorite object is religion. For example, "Bishop O'Malley cannot abide other faiths and his outspoken bigotry pack's Duluth's cathedral every Sunday to the rafters." A rebellious catholic descries `secular humanists': "Message parlors, adult book stores, a symphony orchestra - I am revolted, Pablo, revolted, by a culture that has no strong basis in faith." Vidal likes to use sophistry and spurious language use to convey his characters as trite or hokey. For example, when some insurgents agree to action: "So before the match is lit, we strike!" He also makes jabs at pop culture: "Although almost any fire will win a prize on television, a conflagration is certain to win new advertisers" and "the more lies that Rosemary tells, the higher her stock on the celebrity exchange rises." Some situations paint an absurd scenario. When group of suspicious looking terrorist attempt to raid a corporate board room, the security guard is hyper-vigilant about following procedure (makes each terrorist sign into visitor's log) but am of the larger danger; they are raiding the corporate board room to hold the politically elite as hostages!

For me, the purpose of the book is to point out some of the short-coming of human-kind's superficial self-interest. In his ironic and witty manner, Vidal points out the hypocrisies and prejudices of daily life. He states that "In the absence of an agreed-upon moral consensus, the categorical imperative is self-interest." Some effort for community and altruism is necessary for survival (the ultimate self-interest). However, if everyone is self-centered and vapid, then the prognosis for society is apocalyptic.

This book is Ha-Ha funny and Hmmmm interesting all at the same time. It is a satire, among many other things. Read it and read it again, and then once more, then put it aside for a few years, then read it again. You'll thank yourself for doing so.

While the book is funny and drew my interest in what would happpen, it was ultimately sterile and uninvolving. Quite a disappointment from the author of two of my favorites, "Julian" and "Creation". I get that it is (among other things) a satire on the dry, lifeless, oh too clever world of Post-Modernism. This still does not redeem it from being dry, lifeless, or oh too clever. Granted it archly satirizes much of what is wrong in modern American life, but that only gets you so much credit.

To judge by one of his responses to the Proust Questionnaire published in Vanity Fair, Vidal considers this peculiar little volume his chef-d'oeuvre. One can only assume this is another example of the well-documented phenomenon of a parent reserving his fiercest love for his sickliest child.

Although written in the nondemanding (for authors and readers alike) turn-the-squares'-cliches-against-them style of his celebrated poleminc-cum-sex-comedy "Myra Breckenridge", "Duluth" generally fails to sting or tittilate. Consider this representative (you'll have to take my word for it) sample of the book's approach, taken from its opening pages:

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"I believe, Edna, that a Negro is being lynched."

"You'll love Duluth. I can tell." Edna revs up her jalopy's motor. "We have excellent race relations here, as you can see. And numerous nouvelle cuisine restaurants."

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Oh, that vile bourgeois complacency! I can just picture Vidal's Washington-elite nostrils twitching with contempt as he composes at the writing desk in his palazzo in Ravello, Italy. Only one can't help but wonder: is it racism that excites his disgust or just the stench of the middle class?