In The Golden Age, the concluding volume of the Narratives of Empire series, Gore Vidal’s cynicism about American history reaches its height. The book is worse for it: It is largely a chain of slings against US leaders, with little plot or character development.
Although the conclusion takes readers to the year 2000, the book is mostly set in the FDR and Truman presidencies. Vidal's main allegations—that Roosevelt provoked a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to get the US into World War II and that Truman and the military-industrial complex solidified the Cold War by their anticommunist fanaticism—are hardly nuanced or supported by historical fact. The actual threats the country faced are discounted.
As in past novels in the series, the book centers around the fictional Sanford family. Mostly encountering them chattering at Washington cocktail parties, we are hard pressed to care much about their fates. Vidal himself appears in the book and at the end is interviewed by the fictional great-great-great-grandson of Aaron Burr (named Aaron Burr), bringing the series full circle back to the first book. Burr and Lincoln are the two best and chronologically earliest books in the series; readers might want to stop after those. Vidal wrote another American historical novel, Washington, D.C., before he envisioned a series of books. It covers much the same period as The Golden Age and is counted among the seven volumes of the Narratives of Empire.
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