SOURCE: “A Wrinkle in Time,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 15, 1998, p. 6.

In the following review, Rubin offers an unfavorable assessment of The Smithsonian Institution.

In 1948, still in his early 20s, having already published two quite creditable works of fiction, Gore Vidal made literary history with The City and the Pillar, the first mainstream American novel to treat homosexual desire as a natural, if not exactly commonplace, phenomenon in the life of a normal, red-blooded American male. In the 50 years since then, in an amazingly inventive variety of literary and even extra-literary forms, Vidal has continued his role as gadfly. Novelist, essayist, playwright, celebrity and occasional candidate for political office, he is a durable fixture on the American scene, a kind of latter-day blend of the glamorous Athenian renegade Alcibiades and the cultivated Roman satirist and taste-maker T. Petronius Arbiter.

The critical consensus seems to rate Vidal...