SOURCE: “The Red, White, and True,” in New York, May 31, 1993, pp. 60-1.

In the following review, Koenig offers a generally positive assessment of United States.

Perhaps the greatest irony in Gore Vidal’s pieces on the state of the union, of the literary arts, and of his state of being (responses to persons and events) is the pun of the title. Though Vidal’s subject has often been American writing and government, his persona has always been that of a lordly and cynical European, swirling his cloak about him and murmuring something amusingly scandalous and unanswerable. For all Vidal’s defense of the theory of America, his opinion of it in practice is conveyed in such Lord Henry Wotton-ish exhalations as “War tends to be too much for any writer, especially one whose personality is already half obliterated by life in a democracy.”

Despite Vidal’s contempt for...