SOURCE: A review of Palimpsest, in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 3, Summer, 1996, p. 704.

In the following review, LaHood offers a positive assessment of Palimpsest.

Gore Vidal lived, off and on, in Rome for close to thirty years. The reason: “For one thing, I had never had a proper human-scale village life anywhere on earth until I settled into that old Roman street.” On the other hand, he observes: “I never wanted to meet most of the people that I had met and the fact that I never got to know most of them took dedication and steadfastness on my part.”

Palimpsest, Vidal’s fascinating memoir of his first forty years of life, swings in its narrative mood from one to the other of these two poles: from a poignant humanity to a caustic cynicism. He writes as “the eternal outsider, the black sheep among those great good white...