Duluth

by Gore Vidal

"A wild spoof of absolutely everything: social pretenses, law enforcement, marriage, open marriage, racism, literature, television, science fiction, and sex. Dozens of plots perk along at an amazing pace . . . . raunchy, dirty, outrageous, rife with cliches — and often very funny." — People
"One of the most brilliant, most radical, and most subversive pieces of writing to emerge from America in recent years." — The New Statesman
"Vidal belongs to that group of writers of our time who, precisely because they have always kept their eyes open to the disorders and distortions of our age, have chosen irony, humor, comedy — in other words, the whole range of literary instruments belonging to the universe of the laugh — as their means of settling accounts." — Italo Calvino

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction, American, Novels, Modern, The United States Of America

252 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 1983

About the author

Works of American writer Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, noted for his cynical humor and his numerous accounts of society in decline, include the play The Best Man (1960) and the novel Myra Breckinridge (1968) .

People know his essays, screenplays, and Broadway.
They also knew his patrician manner, transatlantic accent, and witty aphorisms. Vidal came from a distinguished political lineage; his grandfather was the senator Thomas Gore, and he later became a relation (through marriage) to Jacqueline Kennedy.

Vidal, a longtime political critic, ran twice for political office. He was a lifelong isolationist Democrat. The Nation, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books, and Esquire published his essays.

Essays and media appearances long criticized foreign policy. In addition, he from the 1980s onwards characterized the United States as a decaying empire. Additionally, he was known for his well publicized spats with such figures as Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Truman Capote.

They fell into distinct social and historical camps. Alongside his social, his best known historical include Julian, Burr, and Lincoln. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), outraged conservative critics as the first major feature of unambiguous homosexuality.

At the time of his death he was the last of a generation of American writers who had served during World War II, including J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. Perhaps best remembered for his caustic wit, he referred to himself as a "gentleman bitch" and has been described as the 20th century's answer to Oscar Wilde

Also used the pseudonym Edgar Box.

+++++++++++++++++++++++
Gore Vidal é um dos nomes centrais na história da literatura americana pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Nascido em 1925, em Nova Iorque, estudou na Academia de Phillips Exeter (Estado de New Hampshire). O seu primeiro romance, Williwaw (1946), era uma história da guerra claramente influenciada pelo estilo de Hemingway. Embora grande parte da sua obra tenha a ver com o século XX americano, Vidal debruçou-se várias vezes sobre épocas recuadas, como, por exemplo, em A Search for the King (1950), Juliano (1964) e Creation (1981).

Entre os seus temas de eleição está o mundo do cinema e, mais concretamente, os bastidores de Hollywood, que ele desmonta de forma satírica e implacável em títulos como Myra Breckinridge (1968), Myron (1975) e Duluth (1983).

Senhor de um estilo exuberante, multifacetado e sempre surpreendente, publicou, em 1995, a autobiografia Palimpsest: A Memoir. As obras 'O Instituto Smithsonian' e 'A Idade do Ouro' encontram-se traduzidas em português.

Neto do senador Thomas Gore, enteado do padrasto de Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, primo distante de Al Gore, Gore Vidal sempre se revelou um espelho crítico das grandezas e misérias dos EUA.

Faleceu a 31 de julho de 2012, aos 86 anos, na sua casa em Hollywood, vítima de pneumonia.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pop culture needs its own hallowers and it has found one in Gore Vidal. Duluth is a unhinged lampoon of all the tasteless clichés of pop culture brewing in the seething caldron of venomous mockery.

‘When I look about Duluth and see what they have created – massage parlors, adult book stores, a symphony orchestra – I am revolted, Pablo, revolted by a culture that has no strong basis in faith. Oh, not just religious faith…’

Duluth is an unrestrained ramble about the garden of earthly vulgarity… Alien spaceships, tasteless shows, absurd escapades, fake historical fiction, romantic figments – everything is turned into the burlesque mincemeat.

‘Will Beryl follow her beloved to Moscow – in the cold winter – with the wolves howling as her samovar hurtles across the frozen wastes of – uh, inner Europe? Truth to tell, I don’t know,’ says Rosemary in a hoarse conspiratorial whisper. ‘But I do know that when, finally, Napoleon and she are together again in one another’s arms, this will be a Napoleon never before revealed in a true fiction. Picture a tall muscular man, with flashing gray-blue eyes beneath black brows…’

Only inveterate aesthetes read thick esoteric and incomprehensible books but all the normal people enjoy fizzy belles-lettres.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another of Gore’s raucous entertainments. This anarchic semi-satirical, semi-surreal novel flirts with the metafictional (two decades after its heyday) and flings about a dozen different plots at the reader that all intersect in sometimes random and sometimes logical ways. I gave up looking for the clever connective tissue between the elements fifty pages in, possibly because there isn’t any. Summarising the novel would also be a waste of my time, since the storylines all take various absurdist detours into fictional reality, political satire, edgy rape humour (something uncommon these days—wonder why), and an exhausting display of imaginative barbs that relent only when the book staggers to its bug apocalypse climax. This is the sort of book most authors would write if they had the status to publish anything like Mr. Vidal—a completely berserk detour of the imagination unfiltered by such trivialities as audiences, readers, or marketing strategies. Completely loco and hilarious.

[Amber · Rating 1 out of 5]

First 10 pages: wow! So inventive and avant garde!

Next 30 pages: hm, this isn't really all that funny and is kind of just as trashy as the stuff it's supposed to be spoofing.

Rest of book: WTF, Gore Vidal? We're supposed to think it's funny that a female cop systematically rapes immigrant Mexicans and ultra-stereotyped black men (chanting "give me your okra and prunes!")? And then the immigrants gang-rape her as a revenge, but she doesn't really mind because she's a good sport -- until they try to rip her up with a knife? Then she screams, and the male cop comes and rescues her but he's so turned on he makes her play dominatrix and handcuff him and almost have sex with him just seconds after the Mexican rapist/attacker gang have escaped and she's, you know, bloodied and traumatised... but she just flips her hair and plays along? Ha ha, right?

And meanwhile, sadly, the other story lines are just boring.

Overall, nothing is funny or outrageous (except all of the funny, funny raping) because the world this book takes place in has no rules so there are no transgressions. Anything can happen for no real good reason. (The police chief moves a push pin and a nonsensical law of physics is invented/invoked to explain why this in turn causes the space ship it represents to move). And the framing conceit about characters moving between novels and media (which could have been really cool) is too sloppily applied to have any meaning. It's like a high school free writing exercise, or a drug-fueled rant about 1970s culture that somehow morphs into Gore Vidal getting his rocks off to sick racist/sexist fantasies because he can in a supposed satire. He's supposed to spoofing trash, but mainly he's just glorifying and enhancing it in a really haphazard, non-sequiter way. I really hated it. A lot. And had to stop after about 100 pages because it was literally making me ill.

(Which is too bad becuase the synopsis was so intriguing. SIGH.)

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most entertaining book that I have read for years.

*Who will be the new mayor of Duluth?
*What's inside the alien space-ship that has landed in the city?
*Who is Big John?
*And, will Chloris Craig, the author who cannot read or write, ever discover who killed Betty Grable?
*And whose baby is Darlene Eck carrying?
*Can the Marchioness of Skye get the secret plans, which she has stolen, to Napoleon in Moscow?

These and many other important questions can only be answered by reading Gore Vidal's eccentric Duluth

The sub-plots that criss-cross and interweave, often overlapping and merging, are brilliantly original. The characters, who even when dead reappear in different guises, are well-portrayed and behave outrageously.

Vidal's humour is vibrant, radioactive, penetrating, and cutting.

This is a book that I cannot recommend highly enough.

[Louise · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 gratuitous 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.

[ZeeMi · Rating 1 out of 5]

I imagine Mr. Vidal (whom I generally admire) writing this slight and trivial novel in his Ravello manse, banging out a good dozen pages daily on the Amalfi Coast before the guests arrive and he breaks out the whiskey. He’d get legendarily blotto every afternoon, then wake up the next day hung to the gills to crank out more of the same.

There’s an undeniably great writer slouched at that typewriter, but to my eye Mr. Vidal just isn’t trying here. Duluth has the feel of an author making shit up as he goes along, amusing himself with an unnecessarily ornate concept feathered with crude humour and an erudite voice that encourages his reader to think he's accomplishing more than in fact he ever does. With satire, sooner or later the rubber needs to hit the road. Gore Vidal is simply skidding.

[Nicholas Beck · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an absolute riot. Gore Vidal's satire takes no prisoners. All good satires should have this aim.
Still relevant and not dated which is disturbing!

[Roz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wild, reckless read, Gore Vidal's Duluth is a complete takedown of American pop culture, c. 1980. In just over 200 pages, Vidal spoofs everything from Ronald Reagan to conspiracy theories to romantic fiction to pulpy sci-fi. His novel is a jumpy ride through genres, styles and form, often moving between stories within stories, often with a sense of how reckless the plot can get.

Basically, this is a novel about a mayoral election in Duluth, a city just south the Canadian border. It's also a story about a crime lord in Duluth, a city just north of New Orleans. It's about warring Betty Grable biographers in Duluth, a city just removed from a vast desert and about a spaceship landing in Duluth, a city just outside a swamp. Vidal's Duluth is everything and nothing, changing as he needs it to represent some other part of America. It can be a bit jarring if taken literally, but when he pokes fun at everything on every page, it's a bit hard to.

Still, his satire is a little heavy-handed at times and I often found it a little too on-the-nose.; the stuff surrounding Darlene Ecks comes to mind. And while it's a little dated in some ways, but in others, it's remarkably ahead of it's time: Dallas, after all, just returned to the airwaves and the media's barely changed in the 30 years since Vidal wrote this.

All in all, it's a funny read. Recommended for readers who don't mind an absurd plot, especially if they'll get the jokes about Pynchon or Kosinski.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Po-mo Ronald Firbank! Very funny at times.

"Rosemary has been unusually kind since the hallucination in the Bistro Garden. Edna's lines are now much longer that 'you mean dot dot question mark.' Rosemary has made a lot of interesting variations like 'For Heaven's sake, Silas, you can't mean that dot dot question mark.'"

"Beryl quickly darts to the other side of the carriage, reloading her matchlock as she does, pushing the bullets in with a long stick and arranging the white powder in the pan. Rosemary is one lousy novelist, Beryl thinks, irritably, having to do all this with an eighteenth-century matchlock when there are perfectly decent revolvers available in the Regency period, but Rosemary is too lazy to give an extra punch or two to the old word-processor and tap one of Georgette Heyer's gems for some much-needed verisimilitude."

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is completely twisted and fabulous. Just when you think it can't get any stranger it does!!

[Ben Vogel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hated this more than I've hated anything I've ever read. Ick.

[John Uzzi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This wasn't up to my expectation.

[anita Lauricella · Rating 1 out of 5]

the reveiw was probalby accurate 30 years ago, not now

[Kevin Tole · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hilarious romp. To not like this is to be either eternally po-faced or to miss the point entirely. Vidal plays for laughs thats for sure and you may dislike it for it's choice of easy targets. Characters are all weird and at times stupid caricatures as ciphers of Americana played out by television and fantasy - a kind of 'F*** that!. Let's have some fun!' in any number of dimensions and media.

And beyond that? Well.... indeed.... not a lot other than the expanded literary trope of metafiction where Duluth is Duluth the place, Duluth the book, Duluth the TV series, where characters die and are reborn in the TV series, or may appear elsewhere or reappear with or without any knowledge of a past existence, where Dorothy may or may not realise that she is not in Kansas anymore. It takes Flann O'Brien's ideas on Dermot Trellis in At Swim-Two-Birds where the bed-bound Trellis writes of characters in his stories only for them to attain real life who then proceed to drug Trellis to sleep more so that they may experience longer periods of their own lives outside of the confines of the novel he is writing. Whether Vidal knew of the work of the Magical Alcoholic Dubliner is unknown but I would suggest he owes a great debt to Brian O'Nolan. Having said that, Vidal pushes those ideas in other directions and throws in particularly American references just to keep us in line and get us guessing.

It becomes an outrageous camp hoot - just the kind of thing needed after some brick of a dry European scribbler of existential angst and depression. Vidal is like a resurrected O'Brien in the body of a super-intelligent Ru Paul with all the potential for metafiction on metafiction that is both semi-serious and spoofing and full of quirky phillipics.

Characters die in one fiction and are reborn in another like a mad media Buddhist reincarnation. Fictive laws pertain like the laws of physics. Vidal throws brickbats at American soap-opera-as-life, or perhaps the other way round. It begins to even sound like 'Dallas'. Every chapter begins with the definitive so that we know who or where we are positioned for the next romp. Despite the multi-dimensional swap shop of characters and 'plot' (if you can at all attribute form to this creation) this is an easy book to follow but the po-faced will find it pretentious and just plain silly, probably stating something like "Vonnegut did it so so much better". The easiest way is to take all of it as scabrous episodes banged out on the IBM Golfball for a couple of hours in the afternoon between the late lunch and early assembly for evening cocktails. And THAT'S what gets the critics and the po-faced alike. That even Vidal doesn't seem to take it seriously! And of course he was attacked by the literati on both sides of the pond in vituperative revenge for the desecration of what they felt Gore had done to the sacred godhead of 'Literature'. The great shibboleth of poking fun at the privilege of intelligentsia. But he had a hardened skin and there are numerous tales of his fight picking, sometimes going as far as legal courtroom battles, with those he saw as anally uptight morons. He had a low tolerance of what he defined as idiots.

If this book has a kinship to anything it is to pulp fiction, the kind of thing that might appear in 'Nasty Tales' or 'Fantasy' or some other luridly illustrated 50's comic. There are so many wicked asides and digs all the way through the book but it is more than just a set of aphorisms against the vanity and excess of Americana. I loved it. You might need to park your literary sensibilities at the door before taking it on.

[Jeremy Hurd-McKenney · Rating 1 out of 5]

I won't even delve into how absurdly offensive nearly every page of this novel is, as I'm sure it was entirely intentional. I gather this was supposed to be fraught with highly amusing, scathing commentary on the excesses of the 1980's, but either I was too young back then to fully get in on the joke, or it's so obtuse that only the author knows it's there. I hate this particular genre of postmodern fiction--the perverse, incoherent driveling of dirty old men--and I probably wouldn't have started this had I known that's what it was going to be. At least Vidal is a better writer than, say, a Nicholson Baker, so there was a layer of candy coating over this crap. Maybe this shocked and scandalized the literary aesthetes of 30 years ago, but today it merely resembles bathroom wall scrawl.

[Frank McGirk · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh.

I was intrigued for about 25 pages or so. Written in 1983, it looked like Vidal was going to lampoon race relations vs. middle-to-upper class existence (there was an all but un-commented on lynching of a black man on page 3, a female officer who liked to molest illegal aliens, actual real aliens (or at least their spaceship) ...and maybe he did, but I started skimming before page 60.

And not because I couldn't handle to total non-PC language...but because Vidal was also getting cutesy playing with literary theory fluff (characters being aware that they were previously--or contemporaneously--characters in other stories, etc).

Perhaps if I stuck with it, I would have found the rhythm of the book and "saw" a deeper meaning or some novel connections...but, yeah. I couldn't do it. It felt like silliness, maybe not quite entirely random silliness, but I didn't trust him to pull it all together.

[António Lima · Rating 5 out of 5]

É uma benção chegar a uma idade em que já se leram centenas de livros e, por já se ter lido um pouco de quase tudo e por se ter uma idade em que já não é fácil surpreender-se, poder descobrir isto!
Já tinha lido outras coisas de Gore Vidal e depois das suas memórias fui descobrir este tesouro. Pelo que leio nas críticas aqui plasmadas, de gente que se leva demasiado a sério, precisamos de muitos GV para poder com tanta fineza, imaginação e ironia fazer a critica de uma sociedade que não pára de regredir. Falo da norte-americana mas vale para outras geografias.
A ler sem moderação. Sem barreiras. E sem falsos moralismos (sejam estes de que quadrante forem).

[Bobparr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mai mi era capitato tra le mani un libro di V. e men che meno un'opera cosi' ... strampalata. I personaggi escono (morti) dalla vita reale, per entrare (vivi) in opere letterarie, per uscirne e trovarsi in situazioni che non si possono citare per non rovinare la lettura. Su tutto aleggia l'inquietante figura del... Dude. Un fuoco di artificio narrativo dalle tante sorprese. Vidal è un intrattenitore nato, con il dono di una fantasia incontenibile - e di una linguaccia altrettanto pericolosa. Il libro pare essere il piu' richiesto nella biblioteca del carcere femminile di Lima, Peru'. Nella edizione italiana è introdotto da uno scritto di Calvino, che non ho letto - ma che sara' senz'altro di grande interesse.

[Tracey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started reading this book. I bought it at a used book sale because of the title Duluth, which is the name of the city in northern Minnesota where my grandfather grew up. It became apparent right away that this book had nothing to do with the Duluth I know. It is a science fiction book and had so many weird things going on I couldn't pursue reading it. (I think it is set in the future and all the geography of our country has been mixed up/around. It probably comes out later that there have been huge disasters, earthquakes, or whatever, to mangle the location of the landmarks we know that have changed.)

[Rick Edwards · Rating 2 out of 5]

soap opera -- actors shifting between dramas, dying on one, still living on another -- multiple presidents, one old one who sounds like Reagan -- Duluth same but different, corruption doesn't fit city I know, but it might be a reasonable modern projection of the Jay Gould types who put the place on the map. Racial-ethnic stereotypes. Illegal aliens as well as aliens from outer space. Media monopolies. Competing pulp novelists. Politics of manipulating public opinion. Had to overcome initial repulsion to keep reading, but the book grew on me. Problem is it's dated: published 1983, Reagan's heyday, time of racist reaction to the sixties and seventies.

[Moureco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gore Vidal tem uma imaginação absolutamente delirante. Citando Italo Calvino: 'Vidal pertence àquele grupo de escritores do nosso tempo que, precisamente porque tiveram sempre os olhos abertos às desordens e distorções do nosso tempo, escolheram a ironia, o humor e a comédia - ou seja, todos os instrumentos literários pertencentes ao universo do riso - como forma de ajustar contas.'

Em português, existe uma edição da Difel, com o mesmo título do original e já muito difícil de encontrar.

[Ed Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know how I've missed this. Vidal is a great writer with exception of 'myra', 'creation',and 'messiah' I thought I'd read them (Burr and Washington DC being particular favorites). then I stumbled over this at the library. It is witty and funny...even hilarious here and there. I'm bummed I deprived myself so long. you'll not regret reading this one.

[Robert Hyers · Rating 1 out of 5]

While Vidal is one of my favorite writers of both fiction and creative non-fiction, this just didn't do it for me. I don't think I made it past the first 50 pages. Once 2 of the characters (I can't even remember their names) drove themselves into another novel, I was done.

[Brian Fagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Next to Myra Breckenridge, Gore Vidal's best "hyper-novel." The first time I read it, it was just an entertaining novel with wall to wall craziness. The second time I read it, i got the subtext. There is a lot going on in this book. Check it out.

[Robert Brewer · Rating 1 out of 5]

The narrative voice for this book struck me as someone trying to be cooler than he/she really is, someone trying too hard. Maybe that's the point? But with all the crazy happening in the novel, it's just a boring read.

[Brandon H · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the book equivalent of channel-surfing and just like channel-surfing it makes you feel rather empty, bemused, and maybe even disgusted.

[Jeff B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Duluth. Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it."

Gee. What does that mean? Anyway, this book is about the town of Duluth located on the Minnesota side of the border it shares with Mexico. Wait - don’t consult a map yet. This book is a satire of Middle America and it’s crazy and meta and has so much wild stuff happening: A heated Mayoral campaign, plastic surgery gone awry, hack author socialites, a murder mystery, and S&M cops cracking down on illegal immigrants. Speaking of illegal immigrants, there’s also a UFO just parked in town and no one seems to know why or what they want. I’ve read a few places that some of this was a play on the TV show, Dallas. I never watched Dallas (though I had the Mad Magazine with ‘Who Shot J.R.’ on the cover) but it definitely reads like a parody of soap operas at many points.

This book also has a kind of Multiverse / afterlife system. When a character dies in the book, they end up in either a fictional TV show (also called Duluth) or a trashy historical romance novel. They are like different versions of themselves, but also can remember and communicate on occasion with people from the story. This makes things even a bit more confusing and hard to follow, but I think that’s the point.

Published in 1983, some of this stuff is timeless while others stuff is very dated. On the timeless side there’s a socialite named Chloris, who goes all in on the plastic surgery and wants to be known as an author so people will respect her. I think if this came out today, people might think it was a parody of attorney-at-law Kim Kardashian or any number of other influencers. Chloris is one of my favorite characters in this book - and has the funniest lines. Like when she’s questioned about a word on a card. She get’s the answer right, but her lack of confidence makes it funnier than any other way it could have been played. Or when she’s comparing plastic surgery and her author rival walks with a limp because they took some bone out of her heel to use in her nose. I don’t know, maybe it’s funnier because it’s still relevant, maybe more relevant than it was when it was written.

On the dated side, There’s a joke, or more a reference, about the insanity plea. When a character, Pablo, commits a heinous crime, lawyers tell him to say he loves Jody Foster and eat lots of sugar - a reference to both the attempted assassin of Ronald Reagan, John Hinkley Jr, and Harvey Milk assassin, Dan White, and his famous “Twinkie defense”. Now that I think of it, there was a lot of outrage over the insanity defense in the early ‘80s (I was only 10 yo) but I think they made it a lot harder to use that defense. Anyway, it wasn’t particularly clever or smart either. Though maybe that's because we don’t think about the insanity defense too much anymore. I wonder how many other pop culture references I absolutely missed. I’m guessing a lot.

And why is this book so cruel to Pablo? He wasn’t a bad guy. My theory was that he was an ex (of either Gore Vidal or the fictional Rosemary). Like screw my ex - in my book, I’ll make him have a tiny wee-wee and make him get multiple enemas every week. I didn’t think this cruelty was clever or funny either. Maybe he was a pop culture stand-in for the Osama Bin Laden of the '80s. I don’t know. I guess that would make more sense.

Racial slurs are thrown around with reckless abandon and rape is treated like the standard, but it was written in the early ‘80s, and I guess that’s just a part of the satire. This Duluth is full of ambition for status, power, and wealth - but not to be smarter or kinder. It’s pointed out more than once that while Duluth now has two famous authors, no one in Duluth reads anymore. This book earns its "W-T-F" shelf I put it in. It's one of the craziest books I've ever read and is worth reading for that alone.

And by the way, I looked up the wikipedia article for Betty Grable and she died of lung cancer.

[Tyler Sutherland · Rating 2 out of 5]

3/10. - This is an academic screed against modern fiction, a psychological assault against the senses, and an raging indictment against the self, the ego, and the id wrapped within a blazing satire. The reviewers above and below my review are all correct; this work contains racist diatribes, depictions of rape, promotion of hateful stereotypes, and a nonsensical plot that sees point A and point B as eventualities, not as eventualities. Duluth by Gore Vidal is one of the most important works of its type, a vital and seminal work of gonzo energy aimed at exposing the excesses, vulgarity, and the hypocritical kitsch of modern Americana as exemplified in the television show "Dallas". It draws from this well-spring as well as various other sources, but over all else from America's wider zeitgeist of hatred, fury, greed, arrogance, pride, and intense self-loathing that came to prominence in the fore during the Reagan era and beyond. In this way he utilizes the racist language and stereotypes used with equal venom as well as opportunistic laziness by his contemporaries; the depictions of rape so prominently and carelessly tossed around in popular media as a tool to try to "humanize" female characters-- or give them something, anything to 'do' as the male-centric characters continue on unbounded; and carelessness of direction any-which-way for its characters and plots as popularized by television shows seeking only the next cliffhanger, the next character beat, the next sweeps week, as a way to post his own Ninety-Five Theses against the church door of America.

This is Gore Vidal striking against himself, against the bastardization of the country in his eyes, the vanity and the sins of his own field of literature as well as popular media, and against the reader for daring to pick it up. He is screaming his throat bloody for someone to listen as he, more than likely, pushed this out in the span of a week of fevered work, pouring himself out onto the page with zero thought for overt connections between the characters and the plots, for they don't matter. Just as nothing else matters in the fictional 'Duluth', or the in-universe (?) television show "Duluth", or in Duluth, Minnesota as in the entire country as a whole in our present fiction.

This work should never be read. By anyone. It is by all accounts utter drivel on its surface, capped by an extremely thick crust of excrement and bile. But below that disgusting facade is a piece worth its weight in gold as a piece of, about, and for its time, as well as an inventive academic piece aimed at exposing and debating the value of modern writing as a whole through satire.

Duluth should be academically discussed, revered as literature par excellence, and reviled as utterly indigestible except by self-absorbed frauds hacking away at keys such as myself and Rosemary Klein Kantor.

[Jörg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vidal has an astonishing breadth in his books. On the one hand, there is his historical fiction with works about Roman emperors and American presidents. Well-researched with an appropriate amount of dramatization. On the other hand are his fictional books. I read his Messiah before and it was one of the best books I've ever read. Duluth fits in this part of his oeuvre. But far more outlandish and crazier than I would have expected from an author whose most popular books are firmly rooted in history.

Duluth is a wild tour de force and a meta-book. It's taking place in a Duluth of reality which isn't quite reality. It's bordering on the Great Lakes while at the same time neighboring New Orleans and Mexico. It's the cultural pinnacle of all America as well as a mixing pot of high society suburbs and barrios in riot. A spaceship lands the very which location of can be changed by the chief of the Duluth police department by simply moving a drawing pin on a map of Duluth.

Then, there's Duluth - the TV series. Characters who died in Duluth, reappear in the TV series and communicate with characters in Duluth - the town. Others show up in the works of an infamously famous author and writing maniac reusing passages of a multitude of books saved in her word processor who herself repeatedly meets with people in the real Duluth.

This book can't be taken serious. If there's any message, it's about modern media going overboard. And those were the early 80's. It's a fun read but I have the same problem I have with Monty Python movies or any other absurd comedies. The ideas are great but they become exhausting when extended to the feature-length of a movie or a book.

[Ivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un livre très mordant - si Gore Vidal aurait été écouté, en 1983, peut être aurait-on moins des problèmes de la réalité qui dépasse la fiction de Duluth imaginaire de 1983 - une sorte de Liberty City de Grand Theft Auto, dans les vrais États Unis de 2016.

Tout ce qui parait absurde et extrème dans ce livre est aujourd'hui normalisé - hypersexualité, hypocrisie et idiotie extrème des hommes politiques, extremisme éthnique sans objectif, violence totale et destruction de propriété pour oublier l'histoire (feuilleton pseudohistorique du "Compte...) poursuites criminelle et censure de la parôle , sans pour autant interdire ou poursuivre la parole de haîne et l'apologie du viol et du meurtre venant des tribunes politiques(ANC, Trump, Poutine et Duterte ), universités(les professeurs de Black Studies) et mouvement sociaux(BLM, nationalistes indiens, musulmans de l'État Islamique, néonazis, féministes radicaux mysandriques).

Gore Vidal n'a fait que démontrer à quoi nous ménera le sommeil de la raison, et selon ce qui se passe dans le monde, le royaume des monstres, qui n'ont rien d'insectes extraterrestres, n'est pas loin.

3.5 sur 5