This is Gore Vidal's second novel. The content, coming of age as a homosexual male, had him blacklisted for 6 years. Undaunted he published under a pseudonym. Six years later, he published again under his own name, The Judgment of Paris, a different narrative with with the same coming of age content as "City" showing Vidal as remarkable and daring from the start.This novel is better than "Judgment" which is more narrative and less interior. "City" gives the reader a glimpse into the emotional li...

A fast read, for all the right reasons. Neat and lean, on the move, going somewhere with both hands on the wheel. Plus, it's a fine period piece with an appealing cinematic quality to it. Better than I had expected, somehow.

This is a great book, a good read. Gore Vidal explores relationships, particularly homosexual relationships, tastefully, delicately, and above all elegantly.This short book has a cleverly constructed story line. It follows the development of young Jim Willard who develops a serious crush on his school friend Bob Ford just before both of them set off from their home towns to begin their lives in the wider world. Jim encounters a series of colourful characters including a flamboyant gay Hollwood s...

Time had stopped. Head down to the visitor's attractions of earth open wishes. What were you dreaming when it hit. Asteroid eyes rove the green eyed monsters monumentally frozen into mountainsides. You get what you paid and sold. The secret smile cried into cold dead hands. Hold the palm shut to make stick in after life. Jim in the dark wonders that everyone doesn't know. What the bulges in trousers must have invited. They dance by tables in whirls of what to wear or does it always look that way...

gay misery porn. the writing is polished and sophisticated, no surprise given that it is by the massively talented Gore Vidal. also, why aren't more people named "Gore"? this was absorbing despite also being boring and depressing, if that even makes sense. sometimes, strong writing can carry me through a maudlin experience. and it is interesting as a historical document. I had heard that the ending was dark but I didn't realize it would be that kind of dark. yikes! well, at least no suicide. sor...

Be warned: Goodreads will "recommend" this book to you automatically if you've read OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS by Truman Capote. Gore Vidal and Truman Capote were both gay men, and both Southerners. Both became literary sensations right after World War II by writing about homosexuality with frankness at a time when it was still absolutely forbidden to discuss the subject in public.Granting all that, however, the two of them really have nothing in common. Not in terms of temperment, talent, dispos...

Ughhh...I see why this was important for its time, but you know what? Go check out James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room which came out in the same time period but was unpublishable in the US because publishers didn't believe that readers would accept a black author writing about homosexuality. I mean, unless you haven't read enough stories about gay men being ashamed of who they are. In that case maybe Vidal's your cup of tea. Masculine tea, certainly, because femininity is just gross here. Or, uh, s...

Vidal's tragic gay love story was no doubt brave and groundbreaking for it's time, but imitators have diminished the story and contemporary readers will likely find the themes cliche. Like so many of his literary contemporaries, the character of Jim struggles to reconcile his physical desires with his yearning to live a "normal" heterosexual life, but Vidal doesn't belabor the point. Instead, he ensconces Jim within the pre-liberation bar scene without defining him by it. Vidal made a concerted

An interesting capsule of its time, The City and the Pillar examines the nuances of queer identity at the height of the closet. Set against the backdrop of the Depression and WWII, the story follows all-American Jim Willard as he wanders about the country searching for his tough-minded high school crush Bob Ford, who left the pair’s small Virginian town after graduating a year before Jim. Jim and Bob hooked up on the eve of the latter’s departure, and the former’s desperate to reunite and build

Tragic and heartbreaking. A story on why you should never go back to your first love......I first read this book at 18, then again at 29 and now at 42. Everytime I see something more and more in it that breaks my heart! I really do wonder though what people thought of it when it was published in 1948?

Nobody prepared me for that ending! This was largely a romantic journey across the coastline of North America. Jim is a sailor and then a tennis instructor as he lives out his transient gypsy life while pining the whole time for a lost love from his youth. He obsesses over and dreams longingly of his friend Bob, a redheaded dreamer like himself who shared a night of sensual connection with Jim but has since vanished into adulthood. Hoping to run into his runaway lost love, Jim travels from New Y...

It took great courage on the part of Mr. Vidal to publish, in 1948, "The City and the Pillar." It could easily have ended his career, but thankfully it launched one of the great literary careers of the 20th century. The subject of homosexuality is dealt with head on. Mr. Vidal's style is hard, terse, and demanding. It follows the life of Jim Willard, a young, good-looking athlete, from a small town in Virginia, where he falls in love with his best friend Bob, who just graduated high school and i...

Does everyone realize how much Gore Vidal rocks?Unbelievable that this book was written -- and that Vidal got it published -- in the 1940s. It enlightened me about the partial freedom available to certain classes of gay men in the 30s and 40s. The coming-out/coming-of-age story seems a little ordinary now, but nobody had done it in America before Vidal, as far as I can tell. His perceptiveness makes it feel fresh. The problems of identity that Jim faces are still common today, and maybe will nev...

this was a mess actually 😂

3.5, rounded up.I'm pretty sure I read this a long, long time ago, but the memory is rather vague. As the first in a planned year-long look back at some of the seminal works of gay literature, this was de rigueur for a revisit. First off, it is fairly amazing that a book so upfront and forthright about its subject ever got published in 1948. It's not particularly shocking now, but 70 years ago, especially as the work of someone barely 20, the shock waves were deserved. But that's part of the pro...

So few of my GR friends have read this and other Gore Vidal classics, I have to pose the question: where does Vidal stand in the American pantheon? Do his historical novels about the Republic turn readers off for their political content and supposedly dry writing? Does his late career as polemicist and hired mouthpiece present him as a dusty old eminence, far too close to the rich and famous to have any worth as an artist of substance? Can someone born into a wealthy political family, close to J...

It starts in school. You're just a little different from the others. Sometimes you're shy and a bit frail; or maybe too precocious, too handsome, an athlete, in love with yourself. Then you start to have erotic dreams about another boy-like yourself-and you get to know him and you try to be his friend and if he's sufficiently ambivalent and you're sufficiently aggressive you'll have a wonderful time experimenting with each other. And so it begins. Then you meet another boy and another, and as y

"Nothing is 'right.' Only denial of instinct is wrong." There is a great and epic, operatically tragic story of gay desire in The City and the Pillar and it is this:Jim Willard is uncertain and confused in his adolescent sexuality. One perfect summer night by the moonlight, he and his best friend Bob Ford, are romping about in the nude by the lake, splashing and shouting and reveling in their youthfulness. They begin to wrestle and suddenly the urge takes hold and they make out and make love. Fo...

Update: I just read this author's "The Messiah". No matter what one might think about this author's writing ability, one has to admit he was not afraid to take on any subject, which did indeed end all of his political aspirations. Review: This title shouts to us: "I'm meaningful and important! Read me with respect!" I was ready to dislike this book. I found the opening chapters ridiculously childlike. And then the characters grow up, the writing gets better. Then tough decisions have to be made....

... Oooooof.This one's gonna leave a bruise. I don't usually go for the kind of spare, direct style, but this just cuts so close to home that no ornamentation of philosophizing is really needed. Jim's wishful delusions about sexuality - early on, that he's not quite so queer, and later on that everyone else isn't quite so straight - are painfully evocative of a couple-year period in my own life. So too was the weird noble-feeling but ultimately self-denying ideal of the Twin/Brother-Lover, with