Shotgun Satire

By R.Z. Sheppard

DULUTH

by Gore Vidal

Random House; 214 pages; $13.95

Gore Vidal's novels, plays and essays can be divided roughly into three areas of animosity. The first is the author's belief that Western civilization erred when it abandoned pagan humanism for the stern, heterosexual authority of the Judaeo-Christian patriarchy. See Julian, his 1964 novel about the apostate nephew of Constantino the Great. The second area that draws Vidal's scorn is American politics, which he dramatizes as a circus of opportunism and hypocrisy. See The Best Man; Washington, D.C.; Burr. The most freewheeling disdain is directed at popular culture, macho sexuality and social pretensions. See Myra Breckinridge; Myron ...

And now, Duluth. The novel is a shotgun satire of, among other things, the modern literary racket, from assembly line romances to academic criticism. Take, for example, Vidal's mock theory of apres poststructuralism: "Corollary to the relative fictive law of absolute uniqueness is the simultaneity effect, which is to fiction what Miriam Heisenberg's law is to physics. It means that any character can appear, simultaneously, in as many fictions as the random may require." This is meant to explain why characters who die in Duluth can reappear in a TV show of the same name or a romance novel by a Rosemary Klein Kantor. Duluth is dislocated along the Mexican border next to "the winding Colorado River that empties into palm-lined Lake Erie."

Ms. Kantor is a Prospero with a word processor hooked to a memory bank stuffed with 10,000 popular novels. Her books are put together with pieces of these old fictions. But there can be glitches: "Rosemary's word processor is on the blink and she is not getting the sort of scenes that Rogue Duke needs. But Redbook is pressing her. So Rosemary tries to dredge up some Georgette Heyer channel-packet stuff. Instead Rosemary gets a Bulwer-Lytton trireme, by mistake."

Deprived multitudes who do not know that a trireme was a three-tiered galley and Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was the author of The Last Days of Pompeii may have more luck with the gummy red spaceship that moves around the outskirts of Duluth. It contains a race of highly competent centipedes who can change themselves into beautiful women or Hubert Humphrey. The aliens do not threaten the commonweal nearly as much as do the Aztec Terrorists Society, a black drug dealer named Big John and Police Lieutenant Darlene Ecks, who enjoys strip-searching suspects.

Vidal recycles grotesques reminiscent of Myra Breckinridge. He also programs a lot of cultural software: the racially balanced TV news team, the English butler from Duluth's elegant Garfield Heights section who asks a visitor, "Whom shall I say is calling she?" and the ludicrous prose of costume romance--"Beryl flares her nostrils inadvertently, an effect not unlike that of a pomme soufflee getting its second wind." There are also efforts to get laughs from the subject of comparative genitalia.

Duluth is clever throughout but only sporadically funny. One might think that Vidal, after all these years, would have wearied of scourging his fellow citizens for their bad taste, greed and unpardonable urge to procreate. But his reserve of disdain appears endless. He could no sooner shut it off than a vampire could forgo his nightcap.

--By R.Z. Sheppard This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.