OrphanPip

I don't usually write book reviews in my blog, but I've recently finished reading Vidal's The City and The Pillar for the second time. Clearly, if I'm willing to read this book twice, I must have some sort of high opinion of it.

The novel follows Jim Willard, a young man from Virginia, from his last days of high school in the 1930 to the end of WWII. Over the course of the book Jim lives in Hollywood, Mexico, and New York, and spends a brief period in the military. The central theme of the work centers on Jim's obsession with his childhood best friend, who he experience a brief fling with. Jim is focused on recapturing the past, but Vidal sums up the problem with this goal in the final chapter: "Nothing that ever was changes. Yet nothing that is can ever be the same as what went before." Without spoiling the ending, Jim manages to recapture that past experience with his friend, but in a twisted, terrible, and unsatisfying way. (This interpretation works best with Vidal's 1960s rewriting of the novel, because the original 1948 ending is stupid)

Now, most critics I've read agree that the book is not Vidal's greatest work on a technical level. However, when it comes to influence and social relevance, it comes out far ahead of his other work. It is generally considered the first major work of fiction that addresses homosexuality as something normal (Forster's Maurice was written in 1913 but only published posthumously). I'm not much of a literary critic, so I think what I'll discuss here is why the book continues to resonate with me, even in a second reading.

At the most superficial level I appreciate the novel as a time-capsule, a glimpse into a unique period of gay culture. The period that lies between the formation of a definitive modern conception of "gayness" as an identity and the beginning of sexual liberation in the late 60s and 70s. Most of the gay characters in this novel are neurotically obsessed with not being found out, which is understandable given the legal repercussions that would have entailed. In particular, I enjoy a brief scene at a party where a group of intellectuals discuss if the essence of the queer is effeminacy or hyper-masculinity.

The main reason why I appreciate this novel so much, besides its historical importance for gay fiction, is the position of Jim as an alienated individual in a marginalized group. Mostly I find Jim, as a character, to be pretty empty and unbelievable at times. However, he serves to illustrate something important. He is different from all the other gay characters, who are often nothing more than caricatures. Vidal makes an important statement with Jim, that the stereotypes are often true, that sexuality shapes an individual's character, but it does not define it in its entirety.