SOURCE: “Novel of the Week,” in New Statesman, November 6, 2000, p. 52.

In the following review, Barnacle offers a positive assessment of The Golden Age, despite its several historical inaccuracies and American slant.

Gore Vidal musters his fictitious but well-connected Sanford family one more time to round off the septet of historical novels he began with Washington, DC way back in 1967. The sequence is now to be known retrospectively as “Narratives of Empire”, and purports to show how the United States has fallen, like ancient Rome, from republican virtue into imperial vice.

This volume [The Golden Age] opens in November 1939. Caroline Sanford, sometime silent film star, now joint proprietor of the Washington Tribune with her brother Blaise, is staying at the White House. In the Oval Office, a brilliantly portrayed Franklin Roosevelt, all misleading candour, mixes her one of his special martinis and claims to be “benignly noncommittal” towards the...