[Julian] brings together and dramatizes more effectively and with much greater authority than ever before preoccupations that have been present in [Gore Vidal's] fiction almost from its beginnings. Indeed, despite the complete dissimilarity of ostensible subject, form, period and setting, Julian in a real sense recapitulates the themes and attitudes of The Judgment of Paris, which appeared in 1952.

That novel was a modern version precisely of the judgment of Paris, who, in Vidal's pages, is a young American in Europe tempted in turn by beautiful women representative of power, wisdom, and love respectively….

Not entirely obscured by the wit, the irreverence and the fun, the deliberate surface lightness, The Judgment of Paris contains a vision of the twilight of the gods, or rather, of the Christian god; through it there runs the feeling that the world is at a new turn of the great wheel, that one phase...