Washington, D. C.

1967, 1968 Signet edition
Gore Vidal
Washington D.C.
Original price 95 cents, purchase price $1.50
Very worn paperback
C+

Despite the title, and despite having grown up in that city, as the grandson of an Oklahoma senator, Vidal doesn't offer any particular insights into that "overgrown village" or politics in general.  The unsubtly named Clay Overbury, a Kennedyesque (but less intelligent) protégé of elderly and honorable but corruptible Senator Day, betrays the old man in order to achieve his own ambition, with the help of Blaise Sanford, Clay's father-in-law who may be in love with him, while Blaise's son Peter is in love with his sister (Clay's wife) Enid and with Day's daughter Diana.  The book was probably a lot more shocking 45 years ago, but even the romantic/sexual revelations aren't particularly surprising, since the characters don't have much depth. 

And Vidal isn't even very consistent about the sexuality.  To take Peter as an example, at 16 he is a virgin who's so sexually frustrated that he can "think of nothing but rape."  Then it turns out that not only was he seduced by another boy at 13, but he fooled around with supposedly unattainable Enid.  And his sexuality isn't as violent as the first chapter implies.  He's more interested in food, and Vidal isn't even consistent about that.  Also, he ages Peter up a year or two at some point, when he could've just made him 17 to begin with.

The politics are handled in just as inconsistent a fashion, with characters, even the less shallow ones, trying on beliefs like clothes.  So why read the book?  Well, it's part of Vidal's Narratives of Empire series, the first written but the sixth chronologically.  I don't think Vidal was thinking in terms of a series at this point, and there are ways that the later books contradict this one.  The references to Aaron Burr, and the scene where Day is covered in burrs, end up being ironic in retrospect.

The book does move along, with side characters like Millicent Smith Carhart (niece of a fictional late-19th-century President) and nouveau riche Jewess Irene Bloch, stealing scenes.  It's readable, just far from Vidal's best.