The Smithsonian Institution

The secret to enjoying this book is to leave all preconceived notions about narrative form, literary propriety and the space/time continuum at the door of THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. Vidal has built a long and respectable career on such well researched, highly detailed and finely wrought historical novels as JULIAN, LINCOLN, 1876 and EMPIRE, but the imp in him periodically runs off the rails and turns out a MYRA BRECKENRIDGE, a DULUTH ... or this nifty little thing. The plot follows its own outre inner rules of logic. It involves the mannequins in the Smithsonian's First Ladies exhibit, along with their not-so-dummy husbands; Charles Lindbergh; a seriously cracked Abraham Lincoln (now Curator of Ceramics); and an attempt to change history and head off World War II. It defies further description or condensation. All those carefully-crafted novels about American political history serve Vidal well here. His Presidents pulse with life and (historically accurate) personality. A confrontation between George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt proves riveting, and Grover Cleveland - one of the book's chief delights - behaves exactly as Grover Cleveland reconstituted as part of a museum exhibit and helping to avert nuclear catastrophe. Vidal writes for the most part with a cool and polished aloofness -- sardonic rather than impassioned. His sharp, shrewd wit gleams and glints throughout, sometimes with gentle, bemused humor; sometimes like a knife. But he holds strong views about what he terms the `American empire', and he drops the mask of unengaged bystander on one point: the tragic waste of young people killed in war. He makes THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION not merely clever but powerful. [I am reviewing the unabridged audio cassette edition, read by the excellent Grover Gardner.]

Centering around a main character named T., The Smithsonian Institution is part science fiction and part historical fact. T. is a child blessed with a gift for mathematics, and is enlisted by the government to help with the Manhattan project in the early 1940's. T. soon finds himself immersed in a world of greater fantasy than reality. He is hamming it up with Abe Lincoln, and discussing physics theories with Albert Einstein. As he searches for a way to end the war and create a nuclear bomb, T. finds that stranger things than normal are happening at the Smithsonian. T. soon finds himself consumed with time travel and changing history to stop a war that he knows will have a deadly outcome for himself. Gore Vidal has written a wildly entertaining book but it is not for the unimaginative. The reader must be willing to follow Vidal on his sidetracks and accept whatever strange conclusion they may have without using the historical reality available for judgement. Anyone who enjoys history and science fiction will enjoy this book, as long as it is not looked to for strict historical accuracy.

Unlike all the previous reviews of this novel I am not going to dwell on the time machine aspect. Instead I would just like to highlight the love story weaved through the text between Gore Vidal and the main character T....as Jimmie Trimble (Gore Vidal's friend whose was killed on Iwo Jima March 1 1945...one of the bloodiest battles fought in the Pacific). But in this time domain Vidal saves his lover.

A clever "museum-based" book is Gore Vidal's 1998 novel, The Smithsonian Institution. In this fictional invention, set in 1939, Vidal imagines a Smithsonian where the exhibits come to life each day at closing time, and where the museum staff is working with the exhibit characters and real-life scientists, such as Oppenheimer and Einstein, to develop the atomic bomb. Into all this steps T., a teenage boy from St. Alban's School who has absentmindedly scribbled the key equation for the bomb in the margins of his algebra final. When the exhibits come to life, T. joins them in their time. Thus, his first after-hours wandering finds him in an old west exhibit, where he is nearly roasted alive by a group of native americans (The woman who rescues him, who, it turns out, is Mrs. Grover Cleveland, calls him "Veal" for the remainder of the story). In the course of his work, T. discovers a means successfully to time-travel. (A previous, unsuccessful, attempt at time travel by Smithsonian staff rescued Lincoln from Ford's Theatre the moment he was struck with the bullet, with the result that a slightly addled Lincoln now presides in the bowels of the musuem as curator of ceramics). T. takes on himself to alter events so that the world wars do not happen; he prevents wars in Europe, but succeeds in moving Pearl Harbor forward by two years. As always, Vidal is incapable of writing a dull sentence, and this short (260 pgs.) novel marvelously combines great humor, clever conundrums, and serious questions. Vidal has no sacred cows, so some part of his impressions of historical figures and events is sure to offend any reader. Very enjoyable!

Is this one of Vidal's masterpieces? No. But it is a highly entertaining and wickedly funny stab at a genre (science fiction) that takes itself much too seriously. Included are barbed jabs at the idiocy of politicians and the incompetancy of government. While there's not much to say about the plot, you can certainly enjoy the ride. And, what's with that dreadful cover art?