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Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML: Lincoln is the cornerstone of Gore Vidal's fictional American chronicle, which includes Burr, 1876, Washington, D.C., Empire, and Hollywood. It opens early on a frozen winter morning in 1861, when President-elect Abraham Lincoln slips into Washington, flanked by two bodyguards. The future president is in disguise, for there is talk of a plot to murder him. During the next four years there will be numerous plots to murder this man who has sworn to unite a disintegrating nation. Isolated in a ramshackle White House in the center of a proslavery city, Lincoln presides over a fragmenting government as Lee's armies beat at the gates. In this profoundly moving novel, a work of epic proportions and intense human sympathy, Lincoln is observed by his loved ones and his rivals. The cast of characters is almost Dickensian: politicians, generals, White House aides, newspapermen, Northern and Southern conspirators, amiably evil bankers, and a wife slowly going mad. Vidal's portrait of the president is at once intimate and monumental, stark and complex, drawn with the wit, grace, and authority of one of the great historical novelists. With a new Introduction by the author. From the Hardcover edition..… (more)
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Lincoln belongs to that popular and very American pseudo-fictional genre which Mr Vidal, concentrating particularly on Mr Wouk, condescendingly accepts as wholesome if simplistic teaching but condemns for pretending to be a kind of literature. Irving Stone has written on Michelangelo, Freud and Darwin in much the same way ('Sighing, he lighted a fresh cigar, and wrote his title: The Interpretation of Dreams'). James A. Michener has made a vast fortune out of blockbusting history tomes, well researched and indifferently written, which are presented as novels. There is something in the puritanical American mind which is scared of the imaginative writer but not of the pedantic one who seems to humanize facts without committing himself to the inventions which are really lies.
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Unfortunately, also as in Burr, Vidal's failing seems to be an inability to construct interesting minor characters. Since it is the minor characters through whose eyes we follow the story, to maintain our interest we need them to come alive and be more than stereotypes, something that rarely or never happens: moreover, a substantial proportion of this already overlong book is taken up with tedious and repetitive transitional passages re-introducing the minor characters whenever the viewpoint switches.
I wonder how much this apparent weakness is an inherent problem of the faceted approach to historical fiction? Maybe it is inevitable in a book like this that all the interest and complexity is sucked into the central character, and the viewpoint characters suffer accordingly. The more so since Vidal is clearly someone who is more interested in explaining the historical and political process than in entering imaginatively into the minds of the people involved. Fiction is a means for him, not an end in itself. He set himself a very difficult task here, writing what is in effect an American War and Peace: obviously something had to give somewhere.
This has obviously been a very influential book in terms of the way American presidents are represented in fiction. Amongst other echoes, I was struck by the way so much of Vidal's technique here was taken over by the writers of the recent television drama The West Wing (whether consciously or unconsciously). But multiple-POV is a more natural convention to work with on the screen than on paper, so it probably wouldn't be fair to say that The West Wing did a better job of making minor characters interesting.
From what I've read, "Team of Rivals" takes the same approach this book did. I might find it more satisfying, at least as far as getting answers. Vidal's Lincoln was an easy read, but not very satisfying.
One final complaint: often the scene switches to another setting or weeks later, and there is nothing to indicate it: no line or double space break. Just a paragraph break. This made the book confusing at times.
The book's first part conveys just how precarious things were for Lincoln and the nation from the initial days of secession when he as President-elect had to sneak into Washington, a capitol surrounded on all sides by slave states on the brink of joining the conflict. The second part takes us from just after the first battle of Bull Run through Lincoln's attempts to find a general who'll energetically prosecute the war, the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg. In the final Part Lincoln finds his general in Ulysses S. Grant and his destiny at Ford's Theater.
The story is told through various perspectives--though never Lincoln's. We mostly follow the perspectives of two cabinet level secretaries with presidential ambitions, the imperialist Seward and abolitionist Chase, and two young men with opposing loyalties, John Hay, one of Lincoln's personal secretaries, and David Herold, drawn into the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln. I read this novel having recently read The Killer Angels, an excellent novelization of the Battle of Gettysburg. This made a wonderful compliment, giving me a view of the entire war centering upon Abraham Lincoln. Serious as the book is, it takes a satirical view at times of its characters (and a cynical view of politics), and one of the more humorous scenes is when Samuel Chase meets with job-seeking Walt Whitman. The book has an exuberance in the gossipy way it presents the various ambitious quirky personalities that keeps the story from being depressing despite the tragic events it treats, from national to personal. The picture of the troubled and troublesome First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, unstable from the beginning and further unhinged by her son's death, is particularly vivid and poignant. The novel is a fascinating portrait of a complex man and his presidency.
Subject matter - I have read several books on Lincoln and his cabinet members, and Vidal's is the only one, even though it's a novel, that makes political and psychological sense of this rather complex man and his times. Maybe it will annoy the hagiographers, who want to make Lincoln out as some kind of backwoods saint, but it's not disrespectful, either.
Modern Library edition, where Vidal is on the
By the end, this reader more pitied than despised Mary Todd Lincoln, but felt both emotions in full towards Lincoln's vicious and insane wife. Salmon Chase comes in for a richly deserved measure of disrepute with his incessant political ambitions. Lesser known characters such William Sprague and 'Chevalier' Henry Wikoff add color and dishonor. The examination of Lincoln's second secretary, John Hay, is fascinating and enlightening.
Vidal inserts several rebels into the story, including a glory-hound named David Herold. These characters are real, but little is known about them and it shows. A reduced role for these characters would have mercifully shortened the extraordinary length of the book.
Vidal controversially has Lincoln continuing to advocate the colonization of freed slaves right up until the day of his assassination. My understanding of the generally accepted view is that Lincoln had long since abadnoned colonization as a viable policy.
Vidal's 'Lincoln' is historical fiction at its finest - entertaining and elucidating. Highly recommended.
Be that as it may, this abbreviation disappointed me. The material on what a
But I expect I would have been happier with a good biography.
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Vidal captures Lincoln's spirit by frequently nicknaming him as the "Tycoon." Vidal captures Lincoln's racism (and the racism of others in that day) in portraying Lincoln's suggestion that slaves be sent to colonize another country. His rationale, however, proved true: The American South simply could not live with whites side-by-side with blacks.
American history's great unanswered question - what would have happened if Lincoln would have lived? - is briefly tackled at the end of this novel. The Radical Republicans in Congress would have been kept more at bay by the man who fulfilled their egalitarian dreams. Reconstruction would have gone easier. Perhaps Jim Crow laws would never have come about. Or perhaps this comprises more hagiography.
In truth, whites and blacks could not live side-by-side with each other in the rebellious south in 1865. It took a full century (and another American saint Dr. Martin Luther King) for this balance to be definitively reshaped. The fifty years since Dr. King reminds us that the American South's history may have been reshaped, but it cannot be erased. I suggest that Mr. Lincoln would not have been able to change this dynamic as much as one might hope. His present legacy as the best American President cannot be greater given history's unfolding. Vidal reminds us in his realistic take on Lincoln that Lincoln is a man - a rare man, but a man still.
Abraham Lincoln is the central character of this historical fiction novel that only has three paragraphs from his perspective in the whole 655 pages of text as Vidal’s cast of characters either interact with or reaction from afar to the man in the White House. Though the many valleys and the peaks of the Union war effort are mentioned, Vidal focuses on the political atmosphere within Washington D.C. from faction ridden Republican Cabinet and Congress to the pro-secessionist inhabitants of the capital. While Vidal pieces together an excellent narrative and interesting characters, he obviously stretches the historical facts or downright makes stuff up including reversing some character’s real-life opinions, so reader beware. The focus on Lincoln the man as told from the perspective of those around him is an intriguing premise and Vidal’s prose make it a good read.
Lincoln is a well-written historical fiction novel by Gore Vidal that shows the 16th President in the middle of a political maelstrom inside a civil war.