Customer Reviews

Two Sisters: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel

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Two Sisters: a memoir in the form of a novel/a novel in the form of a memoir (1970) was Vidal's 12th novel. It came between the satirical Myra Breckinridge (1968) and the masterful historical novel Burr (1973), and was Vidal's only novel of that era not to be a significant commercial and critical success.

It is a somewhat snide take on the emerging genre of the first person non-fiction novel epitomised by Mailer's pulitzer-prize winning Armies of the Night and Capote's In Cold Blood.

The story could be summarised thus: a fictionalised American writer "Gore Vidal" is visited in his Roman apartment by aging writer and former lover Marietta Donegal - ie Anaïs Nin - and presented with a 1948 notebook and screenplay by one Eric Van Damm, recently deceased. While living in post-war Paris, Vidal had been in love with Eric - never consummated - and had an affair with Eric's twin sister Erika ("a perfect feminine version of Eric's own perfect youth").

The novel alternates between Vidal's musings on aging, death, illiteracy, the loss of historical awareness, his past; and the 1948 documents by "Eric" that he pores over, including the 60-page screenplay Two Sisters of Ephesus and an amusing account of the grotesque Hollywood producer Murray Morris (the best part of the novel).

Here Vidal is at his most arrogant and bitter - taking nasty swipes at Vladimir Nabokov ("writers like to attack their betters"), perennial non-favourite Truman Capote, Norman Mailer ("throws himself so wholeheartedly into current events that the fact he invariably sinks like a stone makes no difference, perhaps is the difference"), the Paris Review crowd ("rejects from The Saturday Evening Post") - every contemporary writer, it seems, except Tennessee Williams. It seems to be, in short, a bitchy rant.

Vidal's sentences are undeniably well-crafted. While only a minor short novel, it is unique in Vidal's post-Hollywood canon - not an ambitious historical novel (Julian, Lincoln), not one of his post-modern satiric "inventions" (the excellent Duluth, Live from Golgotha). But the essayistic portions of the novel will be nothing new for regular Vidal readers, and for information about the adventures of American writers in post-war Europe, it's better to look at Vidal's heartfelt 1995 memoir Palimpsest which covers a lot of the same material.

Having already read most of Vidal's novels, plus Palimpsest, I was a little baffled by the time I'd reached the end of Two Sisters. The basic plot is that the narrator (V) is reading through a film script and notes written by a friend from the past (Eric); V realises that he didn't know Eric as well as he thought. Along the way, the usual Vidal subjects appear: death, sex, history, the decline of the novel... What is baffling is that at times V seems quite clearly to be Vidal himself; at others, we are assured that this is a work of fiction. I found myself distracted by speculations as to what was "real" and what not. Presumably Vidal's point, but ultimately it did hamper my enjoyment of a thoughtful, intriguing book. (Incidentally, readers drawn solely by promises on the book's cover of "scandal" and "taboo" will probably be very disappointed).

Don't spend any more time looking for this book. There are plenty more books where Gore trounces around pretentiously, saying "look how smart I am!" And most of them have plots. This one doesn't. He had one clever idea, and instead of developing, turned out post-modern wannabe. Stick to historical fiction, mr. vidal!