Overripeness Is All

By R. Z. Sheppard

TWO SISTERS by Gore Vidal. 256 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

On its handsome jacket, Two Sisters is called "A Novel in the Form of a Memoir." Inside, however, a subtitle asserts that the book is "A Memoir in the Form of a Novel." Either one will do, although readers who know something about the author's life and works may prefer the second. Outwardly combining a tale of two status-seeking females in ancient Greece with what appear to be recollections from his own life, Vidal contrives to use himself both as narrator and fictional character.

Two Sisters is frequently open, particularly about bisexuality and Vidal's by now familiar and overexposed cynicism. Some parts are guarded and smirky for the lucky few. For example, not many readers will link the name of the real lady (N.A. Steers) to whom the book is dedicated with a later reference to "the heroine of a droll revision of the Cinderella story" whose stepsisters Vidal describes as "the two most successful adventuresses of our time."*

Vidal has every right to pay his personal respects, as well as to insinuate longstanding feuds into his book. Yet the thin veil of fiction that he swirls so adeptly around the pale data of his life is disappointing. It will seem particularly so to those who fell for Myra Breckinridge's critical dictum that

"the only useful form left to literature in the post-Gutenberg age is the memoir: the absolute truth, copied precisely from life, preferably at the moment it is happening."

Though Vidal's Myra is one of the most amusing idealists in American fiction, the absolute obviously does not exist in literary or any other form. But the relative truth about Two Sisters is that it is mainly a put-on of the roman `a clef, a teasing mix of characters that do and do not resemble real people. As always, what Vidal puts on is stylishly cut. Basically there is the "now" of his own voice and the "then" of the book's principal fictional creation, a journal written by Eric Van Damm, who was killed and incinerated when he fell off a roof while filming a fiery riot.

Eric is the startlingly handsome twin brother of startlingly beautiful Erika, and the father of her child after a love affair of many years. The Vidal of the novel-in-the-form-of-a-memoir--or vice versa--had sex with Erika too. He was also attracted to Eric, though they never quite made it to bed. In addition, there is Marietta Donegal, an aging mystical novelist who was once lover to both men. The incest angle is best read as a suborbital send-up of Ada, Vladimir Nabokov's incestuous riddle of time and memory. For starters there is Van Damm and Nabokov's Van Veen.

The centrally placed conceit of Two Sisters is somewhat trickier. It is Eric's film script, The Two Sisters of Ephesus.

It is included in its entirety along with Eric's journal entries describing his dealings with a not very comic but triumphantly obscene caricature of a fly-by-night movie producer named Murray Morris.

Eric's script is ostensibly about Helena and Artamisa, two gorgeous siblings who squirm their way to royal fame and power in the Persian-dominated Greek cities of the 4th century B.C. Murray Morris sees them mainly as Lana and Ava in a huge marble bathtub, but Eric shifts the film's focus to the sisters' half brother, Herostratus. Betrayed to the Persians as a Greek rebel by Helena, who is also his lover, Herostratus dashes both sisters' dreams of immortal fame by burning the spectacular Temple of Diana. In one rash act he has overshadowed his conniving sisters and secured for himself a notable historic role as an arsonist.

Contemplating the script and his relationship to Eric and Erika gives Vidal yet another opportunity to do his Epicurus act: pleasure seen as the beginning and end of the good life, death seen as nothing more than the beginning of a blessed reduction into soulless, primordial atoms. He observes that power is customarily pursued for its own sake and dismisses idealism from political behavior. Wearily he views America as a violent, uncivilized land full of literal-minded people with no sense of paradox. Its writers are inferior to those of Europe, ditto its food, and its attitude toward taboos is infantile. On and on Vidal goes, repeating much of the same material he has so often used in magazine articles and on TV talk shows. Two Sisters is ingenious, and its prose is as elegant as any being written today. But, after a while, even those who are sympathetic with Vidal's various disenchantments may begin to wonder why he has bothered to fatten them again on this parodic carcass of a novel.

. R.Z. Sheppard

*Nina Auchincloss Steers is the stepsister of Jacqueline Onassis and Lee Radziwill. She is also Vidal's half sister.

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