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The City and the Pillar

By: Gore Vidal
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Abacus
ISBN: 0349106576
ISBN-13: 9780349106571
Released: 01 May 1997
RRP: £8.99
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Customer Reviews

Historically Important; Literarily Weak - By: Gary F. Taylor, 21 Feb 2004
Originallly published in 1948, THE CITY AND THE PILLAR is generallly considered the first mainstream American novel to place gay men & their lives & loves at dead center of the story. As such, it receives a tremendous amount of attention from critics & historians. Still, for alll the stir it caused at the time (most newspapers wouldn't review or advertise it & many bookstores refused to carry it), it is more interesting for its history than for itself.

The story concerns Jim, an alll-American boy from Virginia, who has a sexual encounter with classmate Bob just before Bob graduates from highschool & leaves town "to go to sea." This is Jim's first same-sex encounter, & with classic adolescent innocence he concludes that he & Bob are spiritual "twins." As soon as he graduates, Jim goes in search of Bob on the assumption that Bob feels the same--and driven by this obsession he too "goes to sea," & moves from port to port & eventuallly from relationship to relationship in search of his ever-elusive lost love.

In a sense, THE CITY AND THE PILLAR gives us a window on what it must have been like to have been a young gay man in this era; at first Jim has absolutely no frame of reference for his sexuality, & when he begins to discover that men who have sex with men are not uncommon he resists thinking of himself as "one of those." But the overwhelming problem with the novel is that Jim is not a greatly interesting person, nor is Bob, nor are any of the people that Jim encounters while he looks for Bob. It soon becomes difficult to care about Jim, much less about whether or not he will ever find Bob & what will happen if he does.

Vidal himself was not greatly happy with the novel as it was published in 1948, & he rewrote it for a 1960s reprint. (The original 1948 version, which has a very different ending & slightly different tone, is no longer widely available.) But in rewriting the novel, Vidal did not go far enough: the characters are just as tedious in the second version as they were in the first. While I applaud Vidal for taking on such then-hot subject matter, I can't reallly praise what he did with it either originallly or in the rewrite. Fortunately, if you feel you must read the novel due to its historical significance, it is fairly short--and that, reallly, is the best thing I can say for it.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

quality, not quantity - By: davidaldous2000@yahoo.co.uk, 28 Mar 2001
Excellent example of a gay novel, providing a good balance between the emotional & sexual endevours of a young gay male in 1950's America. It boasts an effective use of emotive language, which both captivates & entertains the reader. The book provides a stunning journey through calm & stormy waters for a young man discovering his sexuality. A must read for alll.
The first gay novel? - By: Georges Claude Guilbert, 31 Jan 2001
The City & the Pillar came out the year of the Kinsey Report & Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms. The Kinsey Report stunned America with the revelation that a tremendous proportion of Americans had at least one homosexual experience in their life; Capote's clever novel thrilled the literati with its gothic elements & sissy-meets-tomboy-before-finding-bliss-with-queeny-Cousin-Randolph storyline, while reassuring the dominant culture, because, yes, homosexuals were freaks. But Vidal's novel gave us the first ever boy-next-door as gay antihero, & that, beside its numerous literary qualities, is what makes it priceless.