“It seems I had, once again, said the unsayable too soon. I was subversive”

Literary celebrity, critic, and prolific author of many works, including the National Book Award?winning United States: Essays 1952-1992 and more than 20 novels, the octogenarian Gore Vidal keeps writing. Although critics unanimously point to the author's memoir Palimpsest (1995) as a masterpiece in the genre, they agree that the writing and much of the content in Point to Point Navigation pale beside the earlier effort. Reviewers take the avowed stylist to task for some lazy phrasing, though most give a nod to the career, the extraordinary experiences, and the sly, acerbic wit of a man who, seemingly, knew everyone worth knowing in the last four decades of the 20th century. Finally, that's one of the book's problems: the point of all that name-dropping remains unclear, the stories scattershot and even repetitive.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

While hardly his best work it does demonstrate his all-encompassing brillance.

More than anything a reminder of the days when there were public intellectuals roaming the US.

The most touching thing about this book is his description of the loss of his partner of 50 years. He handles the loss in the simplest and most heart-renchingly exposed way - it's a short scene worth reading the entire book just to encounter.

Yikes. I think listening tothe audio book with Vidal reading it himself made it worse, which is incredible, because it was a disjointed mess that seemed to be written for the contract and advance and not for any need to create a good book. He never finished a thought. I don't mind jumping back and forth in time, but there needs to be an underlying thought. This was not a memoir, as much as Vidal going after his bad press and people he had bones to pick. The end was just the worse, where he quoted from a couple books with a new theory on the Kennedy assassination. WHy is that there? What does this have to do anything? Some of it was moving, dealing with the death of his partner, but that was squandered with all this bad will towards his critics and his unwillingness or inability to complete anything thematically.

Snark, Snark, Snark oh how did I get through this?

Name dropping, opinion as fact and I was sexier, wittier and more brilliant than any of you people. It gets worse as the book goes on. In the end it is just a series of musings of people, places and things and his opinion on what did/didn't happen, who lied (usually republicans), and who told the truth (only people who told him how wonderful he was). It goes on and on and on and becomes almost unbearable at the end. Do I really care that Greta Garbo left the toilet seat up after she went to the restroom or his innuendo that she was a masculine? Nope. Only got through it in audible form. Never would have made it through the book version.

"Point To Point Navigation" is Gore Vidal's second memoir; his first being "Palimpsest," which I have not read but is widely critically acclaimed. He was a renowned and controversial public intellectual, author across multiple genres, failed political candidate, actor, world traveler, expat and friend or acquaintance to many of the world's best known, most heralded celebrities in entertainment, politics, literature and high society; including for starters, Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie & Jack Kennedy, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Tennessee Williams, Princess Margaret, Rudolph Nureyev, Amelia Earhart, to name just a few. The list seems endless. Equally glamorous are the many global locales where he resided with his partner, Howard, of 51 years - with much of that time spent in Italy.

Of course Vidal's personal life began quite extraordinarily. He was the grandson of a US Senator, raised in Washington, DC, with much of his youth spent within the Senate chambers alongside his grandfather. His renowned airplane pilot and aeronautics pioneer father created two major airlines and was extremely close with Ms. Earhart, among other aeronautical glitterati of the time.

I found much of the book disjointed, lacking a clear order, and at times a bit droll but it's well worth the read to understand the breadth of this exceptional life. Vidal's little tidbits on family members and the extraordinary people he met, along with his expat tales, are well worth the read. His commentary on society, sexuality, politics, art, media, classism, education, literature, climate change, war, etc, are at times revelatory and examples of just how current he was at every stage of his life. He personalizes historical references and makes them interesting and relatable. I highly recommend this book to lovers of history, individuality and the courage to live life loudly with vigor and valor every step of the way.

This is more or less a continuation of Vidal's autobiography covering the first part of his life, titled Palimpsest (1995). Like its earlier companion piece, a lot of famous people make brief appearances through its pages, but having been published a little more than a decade later and some six years before he died, Point to Point finds Vidal ruminating a bit more on his older age and the end of life. I found Palimpsest more interesting, though a big period of time passed between my reading of the first and the latter.

There's no two ways about it, this book reads like left-overs. Vidal's previous memoir Palimpsest is critically acclaimed, and though I haven't read it, one feels as though Vidal is carefully weaving around more important material he likely covered in that book. Vidal carefully avoids writing about topics TOO close to him. For instance, we never get a sense of what caused the falling out between him and his mother. He points to his mother's rejection of his partner, another enigma, but the whole story is not really covered. He does talk some about his father, but for the most part he would much rather gossip about other people.

This is fine because he's really good at it. Vidal's charming wit, and wonderful stories about Tennessee Williams, Johnny Carson as well as the other obscenely privileged people that made up Vidal's social set are some of the highlights of this book. The best part of the book is the touching description of his partner's death of fifty years. We are not given any histrionics but the depth of Vidal's devastation is revealed through his bleak outlook, present even on the last page of the book.

But this is only roughly a third of the book. Another third of the book, far too much, is taken up with rebuttals to his critics and hit pieces on enemies like the New York Times, who we are informed on numerous occasions would not review seven of his works. Gore Vidal is a talented writer who nevertheless, is in the twilight of his career and his life. He is increasingly falling back on regurgitated wit (he only uses the phrase United States of Amnesia once in this book, thank god) and bleakly conspiracy laden politics, the final third of Point-to-Point. Must we really hear about how JFK was assassinated by mob bosses or how Lindbergh was actually a secret agent for the US government in an autobiography? Isn't it enough to write about these topics in virtually every other essay? Vidal could've done much better.

Incoherent writing with the one aim of name-dropping.

A tiresome, meandering autobiography that should only be read by those who already know everything about Vidal and just want to wade in it, as this does little to explore anything new or interesting to those coming from the outside.

Still, Vidal is always entertaining to read, no matter what the content.

I hear that Gore Vidal is an witty and incisive smart ass. That may be, but this book was a bore.