Burr

“Burr” is a great little book, chronicling the life of Aaron Burr. It mostly succeeds in doing this in a compelling way. But at times, one can get distracted by pace, plot, and prose–both when those items excel, and when they drag.

Gore Vidal has such an ease with language and wit and voice. He's just such a good writer. It's easy to get lost in his prose much of the time, but other times, you can tell when he's trying to be clever, and you can see what he's trying to do, and this can get distracting.

I literally went straight to this book from reading the first Aaron Burr biography ever written by a professionally trained scholar (Nancy Isenberg's “Fallen Founder”), and it was difficult to engage with Vidal's treatment of Burr, as it seemed to fall into the caricatures and traps of Burr's portrayal which I had just spent many hundred pages hearing get debunked. Isenberg's Burr is much more introverted, thoughtful, and eccentric than Vidal's charismatic, swash-buckling dandy.

Nevertheless, he did give life to this character in a fascinating way, and the events of Burr's life unfold in this novel (through a device of Burr dictating his memoirs) in more clarity than other biographers have offered. There were parts that I still didn't understand that, in Vidal's retelling, came alive and became clearer than when shared in nonfiction telling.

As a novel, though, the book does an excellent job giving insight and color to all aspects of the American experience at the turn of the 19th-century. When history is being lived or recounted, it is fascinating, thrilling, and really makes you inhabit the time like no nonfiction account has been able to do. You realize just how many the world was, even then, and how little people really change generation to generation.

However, in order to tell history in a novelized form, Vidal has to jump through some excruciating hoops to create justifications, situations, and devices in which it makes narratival sense for a historical figure to simply recount their life (which, to us, is “history”). He does this primarily through a fictional main character, Charles Schuyler, who is an aspiring writer swept into the yellow journalism of the day and is encouraged to get dirt from Burr which can ruin Presidential hopeful Martin van Buren. This leads Schuyler to “interview” Burr for his “memoirs”, thus creating the conceit within which Burr can wax on about his biography.

This is all well and fine, as far as narrative devices go. But Vidal has to create a whole life, drama, and conflict for Schuyler that occurs outside and away from Burr. And this is where the novel drags, especially in the beginning (it takes far too long for the momentum to start). Vidal seems to fashion Charles as a Nick Carraway to Burr's Gatsby, but his life and thought is never really that interesting, and so the stretches of plot which focus on him really drag. It's always a little frustrating when literally every other character in a book is more interesting than the actual narrator and one in whose head you remain throughout the narrative.

Additionally, there are moments when you can tell Vidal is offering a wink and a nod and bit of cleverness, and it can be distracting. When you start reading about all of these early Americans, you quickly realize an odd feature: American was SMALL. Everyone you've ever heard of intersected with everyone else you've ever heard of. And so you can't tell any story of any one's life without name dropping constantly. You can tell that sometimes Vidal revels in finding a reason for a name to be dropped so you can see the connection and other times he plays coy with names that he either assumes you know or wants to be mysterious.

This can be distracting from the book as a novel on its own terms and leads to just a few too many moments of “I see what you did there, Vidal”. And then you remember you're fundamentally reading a history book.

And this leads to my last little quibble with the book–or rather this KIND of book. This isn't historical fiction. Burr is self consciously trying to novelize history. He writes in his Preface–and conveys in his prose–a certain commitment to history such that you can trust him as a historian. And yet, there HAS to be license taken at points, even if it's in making up the style of conversation in which otherwise accurate facts are conveyed. The fundamental frustration for someone wired like me is that I can't really know which parts he's making up and which is “history”. He'll drop little details that I did not read about in any other biographies of these early Americans. So when that happens, what should I think? Should I implicitly trust it as historical (as he seems to want me to do), or should I not make a big deal out of it, for it could very be creative license? This line is never clearly drawn.

Nevertheless, I am probably trying too hard to find fault in this book, as the novel is so celebrated and extoled by most. And it is certainly worth reading. You will grow in your understanding and intuitive sense of early America. You will see how politics and the media have always been the way they are now, and very little has changed. You will be awed, encouraged, and dismayed all at once. There were beautiful moments, tragic ones, and humanizing turns throughout these pages. You will enjoy it and grow in your appreciation of this country and understanding of its darker, more human moments.