Vidal was at his best and worst as a political pundit and sometime candidate. In 1960, as the hospitable (and louche) proprietor of a Greek Revival mansion in Dutchess County, New York, he ran for Congress on a platform of taxing the wealthy, and, to his lifelong gratification, outpolled his friend Jack Kennedy in that strongly Republican district. In 1982, he ran for the U. S. Senate in California. On the surface these campaigns would seem quixotic at best, but Vidal was earnest in his ambitions and piqued at the people’s failure to choose the best man. “There is not one human problem that could not be solved,” he declared, “if people would simply do as I advise.” What he advised ranged from the well-considered (especially in his more temperate essays) to the far-fetched and downright crackpot. He obsessed over the “national security state,” which had transformed the republic, he believed, into a militaristic empire both morally and financially bankrupt. Fair enough. Nor was he alone in promoting the dubious claim that FDR had allowed the bombing of Pearl Harbor to proceed as a pretext for pushing the country into war. But as Vidal grew more paranoid, alcoholic, and shrill—not to say desperate for attention—he defended Timothy McVeigh as “a noble boy,” and almost predictably (by then) insinuated that President Bush had colluded in the September 11 attacks. Parini, for the most part, is careful to place such excesses into context, rightly emphasizing that a more lucid, objective side of Vidal “was able to lift his discourse above the petty” and write such astute historical epics as Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), perhaps the best of his Narratives of Empire, the seven novels that chronicle our nation’s descent into its present decadence.

Parini is the author of balanced, readable biographies of Robert Frost and others, as well as an acclaimed novel about Tolstoy, The Last Station (1990), and how he came to this particular folly is an interesting story he relates in his introduction. When it became apparent, in the early ’90s, that the critic Walter Clemons was unlikely to finish his Vidal biography because of ill health, Vidal approached his friend Parini with the project. Given their warm but fraught relationship (“I was looking for a father, and he seemed in search of a son,” Parini tells us on page two), and quite aware that the living Vidal would be happy only with the purest virtuosity and adulation, Parini tossed this hot potato to his worthy colleague, Fred Kaplan. Parini describes Kaplan’s book, Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999), as “sturdy and intelligent,” while also suggesting that it was something less than a page-turner and had displeased its subject immensely. Meanwhile Parini went his own way Vidal-wise, occasionally conducting interviews (as early as 1988) for a book of his own, and temporizing vis-à-vis his friend and father-surrogate until the man was safely tottering on the lip of the grave. “So write the book,” Vidal said, once Parini had finally committed himself, “and do notice the potholes. But, for God’s sake, keep your eyes on the main road!” Parini has been true enough to this desideratum, but I also think it’s fair to say that both Kaplan’s and Parini’s books are of a kind that Vidal himself would have savaged—the one as a numbing regurgitation of “scholar-squirrel” data, the other as hackneyed and lazy, and both (perhaps the keenest bodkin for Vidal) as humorless.

Humor, of course, is not just a matter of cracking jokes but a mode of understanding, all the more so when it comes to understanding Vidal and bringing him to life on the page. We never lose sight of Boswell’s admiration for his friend Dr. Johnson, even as the Great Cham’s laughable grossness (the lopsided wig, the bug-eyed gluttony) is evoked with such loving, firsthand particularity. As for Parini, he precedes his chapters with “suggestive vignettes” about his more memorable encounters with Vidal. What is mainly (if obliquely) suggested in these vignettes, however, is a kind of wistful exasperation on Vidal’s part toward his solemn, well-meaning protégé. “It’s a tragedy to see a man who could leap in the air in such a state,” Parini remarks to Vidal of a fellow dinner guest, Rudolf Nureyev, then dying of AIDS—whereupon Vidal “shakes his head, unhappy with [Parini’s] truism, offered as a way to fill an awkward silence.” Perhaps Vidal foresaw that his future biographer would be apt to write that same truism as cold, deliberate prose on the previous page of this very vignette: “It’s sad to see this wasted body occupied by someone who had leaped so high in his prime.”

What indeed did these two laugh about? Take the matter of Vidal’s florid sexuality—about which Parini’s grappling is akin to that of a greengrocer trying to fathom the uses of a speculum. “He certainly liked the idea of being bisexual,” Parini writes, going on to point out that a “note of self-hatred” is evident in Vidal’s tendency to refer to gay men as “‘fags’ and ‘degenerates,’ although he claimed to do so affectionately.” I doubt that “affectionately” is the right word, or the word Vidal used, though perhaps he thought it unnecessary to explain that such camp deprecation is mostly intended to mock the squares who mouth such slurs as a matter of course. In any event, Parini comes back to the theme eleven pages later, by which time Vidal has gone from wishfully bisexual to wishfully straight: “He never acted like a gay man,” Parini assures us—meaning he didn’t mince or lisp in any conspicuous way?—and adds: “He thought of himself as a heterosexual man who liked to ‘mess around’ with men.” As if sensing the reader’s confusion, Parini takes another swing at it 20 pages later: “Gore wrestled with his sexual identity, unhappy about it, never quite willing to acknowledge he was ‘gay,’ a term he despised.” Finally, after another 30 pages, he shambles full circle to his original claim that Vidal, by his own lights, was bisexual: “Yet his primary attachment to men, and to ‘trade,’ puts him mainly in the gay camp, however much he protested against such categorizing.”