Gore Vidal's new novel [Creation] is nothing if not ambitious…. Consider, to begin with, the territory covered….

Mr. Vidal cuts a wide swathe, both in time and space. We follow the career of Cyrus Spitama from his seventh year to his seventy-fifty, and among the cities and civilizations we visit are Susa, Persepolis, Babylon, the colonies of Ionia, Sardis, the Harappan culture of the Dravidians on the river Indus, the Jain settlement on the Ganges, and sundry kingdoms and dukedoms in China: a vast and teeming panorama.

And this is merely the outer shell of the book. Its core and essence consists of a discussion of ethics and religion, a prolonged examination of the meaning of Creation itself: where the world and mankind originated, why they are as they are, and what their purpose is….

What are we to make of this grandiose work about a spiritual Marco...