"Point to Point Navigation": Vidal fills in some blanks — but not all

"Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir"

by Gore Vidal

Doubleday, 277 pp., $26

One reads novelist-essayist-screenwriter-historian Gore Vidal for his pointed political ideas about what he calls "the United States of Amnesia"; for his personal connection to history (Vidal had a ringside seat for the Kennedy and FDR administrations); for his mordant assessment of the sad state of literature in a digital, post-Gutenberg world. And not, certainly not, for the gossip. The jaw-droppingly, blog-defyingly delicious gossip, about everyone from Amelia Earhart and Jackie Onassis to Johnny Carson and Federico Fellini.

In "Point to Point Navigation," the 81-year-old Vidal's most recent memoir, he fills in some of the gaps left by "Palimpsest," his 1995 autobiography, which charted his boyhood and his life-changing connection to Jimmie Trimble, a classmate he fell in love with at boarding school. Trimble was killed in World War II, then walked like a ghost through the rest of Vidal's life.

The grandson of a Democratic senator from Oklahoma, Vidal detailed in "Palimpsest" his first-hand observations of the workings of the American political machine. He grew up on Capitol Hill and later became a sort-of step-sibling to Jacqueline Bouvier, soon to become Jacqueline Kennedy (they were connected, in succession, to the same stepfather, Standard Oil heir Hugh Auchincloss).

The melancholy "Point to Point" offers fragmentary glimpses of the author's world in the days since Camelot, bringing him up to the present day. He is older, sadder, more (if that is possible) curmudgeonly, but still living at the center of a rarefied circle of celebrity. He charts his own forays into politics, congressional campaigns on both coasts that resulted in defeat. Never troubled by low self-esteem, Vidal attributes these losses to his lack of money. He recounts a final bizarre encounter with Jackie O, with whom he had broken off, in an elevator in a London hotel.

Aptly titled, "Point to Point" feels sketchier than much of Vidal's work; it's more like a stack of haunting postcards than any kind of linear biography. And there is, understandably, overlap and repetition between "Palimpsest" and "Point to Point." If Trimble, in his absence, is central to "Palimpsest," then Howard Auster, the author's companion of 53 years, is at the heart of "Point to Point." Vidal recounts with powerful simplicity Auster's long illness, followed by his death in 2003. After paramedics try and fail to resuscitate him, he lies on the floor, "covered by a sheet, black socks on his feet." Vidal is so stunned that he cannot even cry — "The WASP glacier had closed over my head."

Oddly, Auster remains shadowy and out-of-focus, as does the couple's enduring relationship, which Vidal declines to characterize in any intimate detail, except to say that it was not sexual. This leaves a frustrating hole in the book, but also creates an unexpected air of delicacy — there are, apparently, some things too private for print.

When it comes to American politics, however, the author is as brutally frank as ever. And never more biting than when he is describing the Bush administration, purveyors of what he calls "a blizzard of official lies." This may not be Vidal's sharpest work; but it is a bracing and thoroughly engaging scrapbook of a truly extraordinary American life.