SOURCE: “American Prodigies,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 16, 1998, p. 22.

In the following review, Miller offers a positive assessment of The Smithsonian Institution.

On the dust-jacket of Gore Vidal’s new novel [The Smithsonian Institution], a blond hunk and a Scarlett O’Hara maiden clinch steamily, Jeff Koons-style, in a flowerbed, while the museum of the title glowers forbiddingly over them like a buxom aunt. Professional curators will at this point realize, perhaps with some regret, that the book does not offer a literal portrait of daily life in a great museum. For the rest of us, the fable which the lurid jacket clothes is an attractive alternative to the forced Sunday traipse, the dog-eared labels and termite-ridden exhibits, the disgraceful coffee in the Institute. Vidal’s Smithsonian is byzantine, organic, omniscient, linked in some mysterious way to the US Government, the US military, or both; and the exhibits...