Grouped into about 2/3 literary essays and 1/3 political essays, this book attempts to survey Vidal's writing from 1952 to 2004. I was shocked by just how much fun he was as a writer, like his piece covering the top 10 bestsellers of that time, close-reading each and having fun at the various recurring tropes. In other essays he's a fabulous gossip, telling stories about the literary scene in NYC, Italy, and elsewhere.

Vidal never pulls his punches in essays, whether it's cracking wise about a book he's reviewing, or making grand prognostications about the political future of the United States. This habit makes his writing always a delight to read, but works against him when it comes to posterity on the political stuff. (Notably, claiming in 1972 that the Vietnam War had inured us against getting into any more of those types of conflicts. Oops.)

But that isn't quite a fair way to judge someone writing as a public intellectual for over 50 years; there are bound to be some misses, especially when he's staking out interesting ground criticizing the retrograde moralizing around sexual preference, or the calcification of the US into a National Security State. Many of the same concerns he had then would probably be echoed today, though certainly in different shibboleths. At least in these selected essays, there aren't any super-cringy moments where the writing shows its age, outside of the types of prediction misfires mentioned above.

Anyways, I enjoyed this quite a bit, enough to plan on tackling his unabridged United States collection that includes ALL his essays from 1952 to 1992. It's a bit less portable than this one but should still be a lot of fun.