SOURCE: “Bolts from Mt. Olympus,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 23, 1993, pp. 1, 7.

In the following review, Raban offers a positive assessment of Vidal's essay collection United States.

Gore Vidal the novelist’s best character is Gore Vidal the essayist. Beside him even Myra Breckinridge seems a pale creation, and this great fat book [United States], chronicling 40 years of the essayist’s adventures, is like a lively picaresque novel in reverse.

Its hero starts out as a wickedly clever but world-weary 26-year-old: between the inauguration of Eisenhower (“The Great Golfer”) and the election of Clinton (sobriquet still to come), he grows steadily cleverer, funnier, more indignant and less amenable to compromise. At 66, Vidal appears to be just coming to his full dimensions as an enfant terrible: one of the best, most stinging pieces in the book is a passionate attack on Christianity—and, for good measure, Judaism and...