Parini is a veteran biographer (Robert Frost, John Steinbeck) and shows it in the seemingly effortless way he unfolds Vidal’s life and works before us.
What distinguishes Parini’s account is its readability — though it’s not without a certain amount of professorial throat-clearing and too many clichés Vidal would have winced at — and its sympathy.
Mr. Parini fills page after page with plot summaries of Vidal’s work — even the pulp he penned under the names of Edgar Box and Katherine Everard, even the novels available only on Amazon Marketplace. Any literary biography runs this risk...but here, this tic is especially pronounced, to the point that the biography feels like an exercise in slaloming through SparkNotes.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
