![]() ![]() With Allen Vidal shares a predilection for gags with a bathetically dying fall (Timothy on the proto-American standardisation of the Roman Empire: 'It's certainly convenient for the rest of us knowing that no matter where you are you'll find a forum and an amphitheatre and a law court and pizza with fish sauce'). Once something of a hero of mine, he has long since set my teeth on edge with his unseemly patrician preenings and posturings (his sainted grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, has become a particularly intrusive pest of Vidalian folklore), with his smug determination, in recent collections of essays, to be the smartest alec on the block and, above all, with that ongoing cycle of clumpish historical novels which sound the way James Michener, say, might sound after taking a course in creative writing. A believer (of sorts) as I am, I've always been excessively unfanatical about blasphemy, which in any case seems to me seldom to 'work'. This distaste had nothing to do with the reputation preceding the book, of an outrageously irreverent impiety. ![]() ![]() In a similar spirit, if with a slight shift in etymological emphasis, I feel duty- bound to declare a certain lack of interest: before being invited to review it, I was not too well disposed to Live from Golgotha. IT SOMETIMES happens that a critic will judge it incumbent on himself (or herself) to preface a review with a 'declaration of interest'. ![]()
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