The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 , by Sven Beckert. Cambridge University Press, 492 pages, $34.95.

The French banking scion Salomon Rothschild, visiting New York in 1860, predicted inaccurately but insightfully that within 20 years or so, the young Republic would transform itself into several countries ruled by kings and hereditary aristocrats. His reasoning was strictly Parisian: "Here, as everywhere else, there are two quite distinct classes, one that loves to see, the other that loves to be seen," he wrote. "Right now, the first class can find only an occasional foreign prince or some Japanese ambassador to satisfy its fancy; the other class, to its great regret, has nothing to show." (Meanwhile, Rothschild added, American politicians "offer to the people nothing but the sight of their careless dress and their untrimmed beards.")

In a sense, the baron was quite correct. In the decades following his visit, the United States acquired exactly what he thought it desired and deserved: a class of people worthy of being seen. And their Paris then as now would be New York, a city that Rothschild on the eve of the Civil War had found a place of such squalor that it made a Moroccan slum look like "a waxed ballroom." How this transformation occurred is the subject of Sven Beckert's The Monied Metropolis, which begins in 1850 and ends in 1896 by which time the city resembled its current-day self far more than it did the rough-and-tumble port town of the mid-19th century.

Of course, New York has always had an upper class. But in the 1850's, its leaders included men like Peter Cooper, a "self-made millionaire glue boiler" who kept only two servants and allegedly had to be coaxed into donning a dress suit when he co-hosted a reception for the visiting Prince of Wales. By the 1880's, after Cooper's death, his son-in-law would employ 14 servants and redecorate Cooper's simple Fifth Avenue house by adding marble staircases, stuffed peacocks and a clock mounted on a bust of Napoleon.

According to Mr. Beckert, what changed in those years was that wealthy New Yorkers acquired a new sense of solidarity and self-confidence a sense, one might say, of their own class (for which he uses the insufficient and somewhat misleading term "bourgeoisie"). At the same time, of course, they were acquiring wealth itself on an unprecedented scale. But just as important, in Mr. Beckert's analysis, is the fact that the previously disparate communities of merchants, bankers and manufacturers (who before the Civil War often regarded one another with suspicion) merged into a united front to protect their common interests from the city's great unwashed.

Already in 1850, the New York Herald was rallying its genteel readers around quality-of-life issues that would resonate in Giuliani's Manhattan: The "swearing, drinking, silly boors" of the Bowery, the newspaper complained, had "destroyed all enjoyment" of carriage-driving on the city's streets. (Squeegees, anyone?) By the late 1860's, upper-class New Yorkers, arguing that "it is not safe to place the execution of the laws into the hands of the classes against which they are principally to be enforced," banded together in a failed effort to restrict voting rights based on property. In 1877, when railway workers went on strike, young socialites camped out at the Seventh Regiment Armory, bayonets at the ready fortifying themselves for class warfare with meals catered by Delmonico's.

And by the end of the century, the Astors, Morgans and others could with a lack of irony that would have pleased Salomon Rothschild attend a costume ball at the Waldorf-Astoria at which celebrants dressed as Old World aristocrats. Caroline Astor wore a dress emblazoned with $250,000 in gems; lawyers and bankers appeared in pink satin and silk hose; no fewer than 50 of their wives came as Marie Antoinette. Meanwhile, Pinkerton detectives guarded the ballroom against "men of socialistic tendencies." (In fact, wealthy female New Yorkers increasingly aspired to become not just costume-party aristocrats, but real ones: Thanks to marriages of mutual benefit, there would eventually be 42 American princesses, 17 duchesses and 136 countesses.)

As Mr. Beckert writes, "a class that once had shaped its identity and sense of self in opposition to the degenerated European aristocracy now defined itself increasingly by 'blood.'" Before the Civil War, the banker August Belmont, a Jewish immigrant from Germany, reigned supreme over New York society and politics. By the 1890's, Jews had been forced out of the Union Club and Jewish organizations barred from mention in the newly founded Social Register.

The Monied Metropolis began as Mr. Beckert's Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University. With its emphasis on class formation and the struggles of bourgeoisie versus proletariat, it almost feels like a product of the Columbia of half a century ago, when Richard Hofstadter and his disciples hunched over their typewriters, hell-bent on exposing the antidemocratic hypocrisies of the American elite. By and large Mr. Beckert, who now teaches history at Harvard University, proves that even in our own post-Marxist age, this approach to history can still bear fruit. But his old-fashioned analysis, with its emphasis on politics and economics and its slighting of culture, tells an incomplete story.

In particular, Mr. Beckert largely neglects New York's all-important role as a crucible of consumerism. Its department stores and emporiums ushered in a culture of conspicuous display, in which people defined themselves by what they could afford to buy. Its newspapers and magazines fed the lumpen middle class a steady diet of Vanderbilt weddings and balls at the Waldorf, in breathless columns and full-page rotogravures. The continuing division of Americans into those who see and those who are seen predicted by Salomon Rothschild in 1860 began in 19th-century New York, but Mr. Beckert never frames this as clearly and elegantly as Rothschild did. (In fact, he doesn't even include Rothschild's remark in his book.)

And Mr. Beckert scarcely acknowledges that throughout the period he chronicles, there were authors and thinkers who were only too aware of the transformations happening around them, and of the strange fruit that sprouted when a home-grown aristocracy took root in democratic soil. But these voices go unheard, except for a couple of epigraphs from Henry James and Edith Wharton. Both those authors wrote books that might easily have had the same subtitle as Sven Beckert's, and they reached some of the same conclusions without benefit of hindsight.

Adam Goodheart, a writer in Washington, D.C., is a member of the editorial board of The American Scholar.

When did we lose the 1990's? I'm not niggling about the change of millennium and all that. I'm talking about the decade-that- almost-was, that quaint and earnest America of, say, the first winter of the Clinton Presidency. Remember? We were all going to be Head Start volunteers, wear flannel shirts and drink lots of good, dark coffee. And then, collectively, we took a look around and said, "Oh, screw it. We'll take the gigante mocha frappuccino."

And now here we are, eight years and a new century later, wiping the froth from our chins, not the least bit queasy from a long national binge-fest that-we might as well admit it-makes the Roaring Twenties or the Mauve Decade look positively beige by comparison.

Too bad all the best nicknames for the era were already used up. (We went ahead and wasted "The Me Decade" on the 70's ? What were we thinking ?) So (in a nod, perhaps, to the recycling spirit of 1993) The New Yorker has decided to borrow an old one, and has dubbed the time we live in "The New Gilded Age."

In his introduction to this latest anthology ( The New Yorker has been spewing them out-a gag reflex brought on by leg-acy anxieties?), David Remnick doesn't hedge his bets, casts no worried glances at the downward spikes of the Nasdaq. He goes bravely with the present tense, all the way. "This New Gilded Age, this American moment of prosper-ity, satisfaction, and self-satisfaction, is rife with … contradictions," he writes. " The New Yorker has tried in the past few years to capture something of this age-its leading figures, its manners, its mechanisms, its politics, its ironies."

The earliest piece in this collection (James Stewart's profile of a commercially struggling literary novelist) was published on June 27, 1994. The latest (Calvin Trillin's profile of two young Wall Streeters convicted of insider trading) appeared on July 10, 2000. Most of them, actually, date from the last year and a half or so. And yet … is it just me, or do I detect, even in the Trillin piece, a tinge of quaint nostalgia, a slight fading to sepia at the edges of the page? Could this book itself be a sign that the New Gilded Age is already history?

O.K., O.K., don't call your broker quite yet. Maybe it's just that the various authors have so effectively gathered together the telltale artifacts of our times, dusted them off, set them under tastefully directed pinpoint lighting and invited us to ponder them from beyond the glass. The New Gilded Age feels like a collection not just in the literary sense but in the museum one, a blockbuster Met retrospective on some past moment of imperial, millennial splendor. (Think of the current Year One exhibition.) The articles' dominant genres are, themselves, like vases whose arcane shapes attest to the rites and habits of their makers: celebrity profile, personal confession, cultural self-examination.

You can almost hear Mr. Remnick intoning through the Acoustiguide: "Who were their gods, their emperors? What did they wear? What did they eat?" It's all here, set out for us vitrine by vitrine. And some of the most memorable pieces are, in fact, considerations of specific artifacts, like Adam Gopnik's brilliant little 1998 essay (which I somehow missed when it appeared in the magazine) on our newly redesigned and counterfeit-protected paper money: "It's Camden Yards money-see, just as good as the old place, sonny, with all the old-fashioned charm you're used to. Have another hot dog. And underneath-the part of the stadium shown only to Rupert Murdoch-in the security control center, the cables run out to the surveillance cameras that … wink at you beneath their reassuring nineteenth-century façade."

The articles are grouped into four themed sections: "The Barons" (although that's a misnomer, since these are really portraits of our Great Khans, our Holy Roman Emperors: Alan Greenspan, Bill Gates, Martha Stewart), "The Web," "The Age," "The Life." Certain obsessions keep popping up in all of them, though. Like New York real estate. Old money versus new. Home furnishings. And food. Here, for example-recorded for posterity-is what you had for dinner in 1997 if you were a small-time Morgan Stanley employee being set up on an insider- trading sting: "chicken fingers and fried clam strips and spicy French fries and Southwest potato skins and something called Buffalo calamari." Here's what you had for dinner in 1999 at an ultra-trendy restaurant outside Washington, D.C.: "potato cornets layered in salmon, caviar, and crème fraîche … veal sweetbreads braised in port with mushrooms and huckleberries."

The obsessions of the New Gilded Age are, in other words, pretty much the same obsessions that the old Gilded Age had. In fact, it's worth remembering that the phrase itself originally came from the title of a book, an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. The novel's not much read these days outside of graduate seminars, and understandably so: It's a boilerplate job, with very little of the period color that its title seems to promise. If you want to get the flavor of late-19th-century America, you'd be better off turning-as several writers in The New Yorker anthology do-to Henry James or William Dean Howells.

The New Gilded Age may not offer anything quite like James or Howells in full flood, but it does make it clear that-setting aside for a moment where the rest of the country is headed-the past few years have been binge years for The New Yorker . It's possible to cast a skeptical glance at the magazine's newfound fascination with Microsoft stock and Manolo Blahniks, but still admire its reporters' diligent, wide-ranging work in vividly capturing the spirit of our times.

Adam Goodheart is a member of the editorial board of The American Scholar.

In his masterly 1996 novel About Schmidt , Louis Begley traced a narrative whose outline could have come straight from Austen or Trollope. The book began with an old family house in danger of being sold, a distressing luncheon invitation and the threat of a matrimonial misalliance. It ended with a marriage of sorts, and with the reading of a will.

Mr. Begley was most un-Austenish, however, in his choice of protagonist: no pale and dreamy virgin, setting out on life's journey full of Gothic fantasies and Devonshire cream, but rather a cigar-smoking, Scotch-drinking WASP lawyer of the old school, age 60, who'd recently lost both his wife (cancer) and his job (an ever-so-gentle nudge from his fellow partners at the firm of Wood & King). And yet there was something virginal about Albert Schmidt, a sort of naked innocence, as he stumbled afresh into the cold light of the world.

For all its deft vignettes of the splendors and miseries of the Hamptons, About Schmidt was as much a psychological novel as a social one. Mr. Begley's great achievement was to take an overprivileged and unpleasant man–rich, resentful, anti-Semitic, emotionally stunted–and render him vulnerable and sympathetic. The book was less compelling as a dynamic narrative than as a static, meticulously painted portrait. But as such, it had the subtlety and elegance, the sadism and dark humor, of a canvas by Ingres.

Schmidt Delivered , like its predecessor, has an oddly flat and passive title. And its protagonist, indeed, is not a man who makes things happen, but a man to whom things happen. Still, how exactly, one might ask, is he "delivered"? Like a saved soul? Like a newborn child? Like a FedExed legal brief? All of these, actually, as it turns out.

At the end of the last novel, Schmidt had plunged whole hog into the second adolescence of late middle age, embarking on a surprisingly intense affair with Carrie, a young Puerto Rican waitress. At the beginning of the new book, he has every reason to feel pleased with himself. Carrie is snugly ensconced in the house at Bridgehampton. Schmidt's daughter, Charlotte, is separating from her husband, Jon Riker, a son-in-law he'd never wanted. (Not only is Jon a Jew, he is also–perhaps worse–one of the Young Turk partners at Schmidt's former firm.) The odious Renata Riker, Jon's psychiatrist mother, has witnessed the undoing of all her well-knit plans.

But Schmidt is vexed by the premonition–accurate, as it happens–that it can't all last. Especially his relationship with Carrie: "How long would it be before that wild girl told him she had had it with her old and limp lover?" In his lawyerly fashion, he embarks on the project of protecting his assets as well as he can for as long as he can. It surely bodes ill for him that, reading in bed at night with Carrie at his side, he gives up on Trollope and takes up Henry James: "He had abandoned Phineas Redux , for the first time unable to share Trollope's enthusiasm for Phineas or Lady Glen or Mr. Plantagenet Palliser, to feel that, across time and space, true English ladies and gentlemen were his spiritual comrades in arms. In the place of Phineas , he had taken up James's The Awkward Age , which he pored over sentence by sentence, if not word by word, struggling to make sure he understood correctly the diabolical chatter over teacups."

Although Mr. Begley tries hard to strike a Jamesian tone (and although he is, as ever, a master stenographer of diabolical chatter over teacups), Schmidt Delivered seems somehow a gentler book than About Schmidt . It is clear that the author has grown fond of his characters–perhaps a bit too fond. But there are more complicated reasons, as well, for the softening of tone and brightening of colors. Mr. Begley is a writer with a keen and precise sense of history, and while his first Schmidt novel unfolded in the last years of the Bush administration, which may be seen, in retrospect, as the Indian summer for a certain breed of WASP, Schmidt Delivered is set closer to the present, in a less pessimistic world, perhaps, but one that has even less use for Schmidt and his kind. Emblematic of this new age is an important new figure–a Soros-like billionaire named Michael Mansour, "eerily brutal and bright," who alternately courts and bullies him. Like the mysterious Mr. Wilson in About Schmidt , Mansour is a doppelgänger of sorts, a sinister reflection of Schmidt's own appetites, pursuits and stratagems.

Even more than its predecessor, Schmidt Delivered showcases Mr. Begley's long-standing fascination with the interplay or personality and profession. His characters, in a sense, are their jobs. Mansour, the investor and film producer, is "the only man [Schmidt] had ever met who wanted everyone around him to feel manipulated." Carrie, the (now ex-) waitress, gracefully makes her rounds among several men and collects her tip at the end. And Schmidt himself is a man with a mind like a yellow legal pad. He thinks of life as a series of arrangements to be made, deals to be discreetly brokered.

Mr. Begley, who is a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, is himself the most lawyerly of novelists. At the end of Schmidt Delivered , he provides carefully for his various characters, settling them down with an assortment of jobs, houses, pets, trust funds. But he is no Schmidt. His sympathies are too broad and generous, his judgment of character too sharp. He is both prosecutor and defender, as cutting as he is kind.

Adam Goodheart is a member of the editorial board of The American Scholar.

Come sit for a moment, prop your chin on your hand and gaze–like Gibbon regarding the grandeur that was Rome–upon the ivy-covered ruins of the noble New Yorker . Here and there among the shapeless hummocks juts a fragment of exquisitely chiseled phrase, or the weathered bust of some vanished fact-checker. In the rising wind a scrap of paper flutters past, on which can be discerned these faded words: A friend writes …

How quaint and improbable it already seems! It was only eight years ago when Tina Brown's appointment as editor sealed the doom of the storied magazine built by Harold Ross and William Shawn, and yet already their New Yorker is one with Poor Richard's Almanac , or The Spectator of Addison and Steele. What shocks most now is not that it is "gone," but rather that it managed to survive as long as it did–coexisting, if not quite alongside the Drudge Report and Nerve.com , at least with Details and Martha Stewart.

And now Renata Adler, a still dazed and bleeding survivor, comes stumbling forth to tell the world her tale. She opens with a breathless, if belated, announcement of calamity: "As I write this, The New Yorker is dead. It still comes out every week, or almost every week.… Otherwise, not a single defining element of the magazine remains." For Ms. Adler, who joined the New Yorker staff in 1963, those defining elements included "the format, the look, the content, the humor, the level of seriousness; the ambition, at the top; the standards in the middle; the limits beneath which it would not sink."

These delicate scruples meant, in other words, no special fashion issues, no advertorials, no top-25 lists, and no photographs of naked Indians with large rocks suspended from their penises. But then, as everybody knows, Condé Nast came along, bringing with it these things and more. Ms. Adler is probably right to think that Shawn, had he lived to see them, would not have been amused.

Poor Shawn, indeed! These days, it is not just the Visigoths at Condé Nast who trample on his legacy of reticence, but also his former disciples themselves, who shanghai him into service as a mascot for their own grievances and vanities. In fact, with Ms. Adler's book following close on the heels of other memoirs by Lillian Ross and Ved Mehta, the sainted editor's afterlife has begun to resemble one of the Weekend at Bernie's movies, in which the hapless corpse gets dragged off on a series of picaresque adventures.

Ms. Adler's Shawn is a Gothic figure haunting a labyrinth of his own construction–in which, as she notes astutely, "the aversion to personal publicity for editors and writers, the increasing respect for the privacy of subjects [turned] into a reluctance to publish at all." Small wonder that the magazine's two most renowned authors of fiction and nonfiction–J.D. Salinger and Joseph Mitchell–eventually became renowned for their failure to produce.

Indeed, one of the problems with Ms. Adler's book is that her saga of decline and fall presumes the existence of a vanished Golden Age–which, however, she fails to portray with any conviction. It is all very well to declare, as she does, that "for more than 30 years, The New Yorker was not only the finest magazine of its time but probably the finest English-language magazine of all time." And she does begin her narration of her career at the magazine in orthodox mythopoeic fashion (she's the fated editorial assistant plucked by Shawn from her job sifting the slush pile). Yet aside from this, a tone of sour disillusion prevails even in her description of the Shawn years. Anyone who has worked in an office before will recognize her type: the talented malcontent, stewing continually behind closed doors over slights and betrayals.

Obscure succession crises and feuds from the 1970's are recited as gravely as if Ms. Adler were chronicling the collapse of Weimar Germany. And by the time she reaches the centerpiece of her book–her account of Shawn's unexpected ouster in 1987 and its aftermath–the level of detail is numbing, clearly taken from notes that Ms. Adler dashed off furiously at the time. (One's confidence in Ms. Adler's accuracy is undercut by several flagrant errors involving dates. On her book's first page, she says that Tina Brown took over the magazine in 1993, when it was 1992. Elsewhere, inexplicably, she twice describes Richard Nixon as having resigned the Presidency in 1976, not 1974–and Ms. Adler observed the impeachment inquiry at firsthand.)

Inadvertently, too, Gone manages to demonstrate all the deficiencies, or at least the dangers, of the famous New Yorker flat style, which presupposes the vast importance of the subject at hand. This was all well and good when it was John Hersey on Hiroshima: "There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant. Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky." It is somewhat less compelling as Ms. Adler puts it to use: "Stefan Kanfer, a friend and former colleague of Robert Hughes, called me. He had had lunch with Art Cooper, the editor of GQ . Mr. Cooper said Adam Gopnik had told him not only that Bob Hughes was recommending him as his successor at Time , but that Mr. Gottlieb as well was planning, when he left The New Yorker , to recommend Mr. Gopnik to succeed him."

What is anyone, with the possible exception of Messrs. Kanfer, Hughes, Cooper, Gopnik and Gottlieb, supposed to get out of this? And perhaps that is the point. Before it is halfway to its conclusion, Gone begins to read like one long, unsent internal memorandum, a calendar of complaint that works itself finally into a drawn-out crescendo of wild-eyed rage.

From the beginning of her book, Ms. Adler freely indulges her penchant for cutting others down to size–at first, with Shawnian delicacy (the magazine's longtime fiction editor, Roger Angell, is identified here as "a fine baseball writer"). But by the final pages she is knifing almost everyone within reach–notably the unfortunate Mr. Gopnik, a peripheral player at most in the change of regime. In a series of excruciating asides, she slits him slowly from navel to sternum. One suspects that there is no fact about Mr. Gopnik–no physical attribute, no intellectual or moral lapse–that Ms. Adler would have left unsaid if she had thought it would embarrass him.

In this gush of bloodletting, Ms. Adler loses her grip on the important question that lent her book its reason for existence: Who, or what, killed the old New Yorker ? For her, the answer is to be found in the Byzantine annals of office politics. She rejects–convincingly enough–the idea that the magazine had to change in order to keep up with the times, to meet the expectations of an impatient public: A great publication, she writes, "goes its way, and forms its audiences as it goes."

Yet The New Yorker 's cozy scribblers were probably fated to succumb to one barbarian horde or another: By the 1980's, at least, when Condé Nast's parent company began buying up shares, there were simply too many Visigoths at large in the world. And with this book, ironically, Ms. Adler has taken the once-cozy genre of the New Yorker memoir and brutalized it beyond recognition–exactly what she accuses others of doing to the magazine itself.

Ah, to have been Gore Vidal! The blond princeling in 1930's Washington, the postwar prodigy, boozing and cruising with Tennessee and Truman, Christopher Isherwood and Paul Bowles; the double-edged sexual swordsman, slaying youths and maidens with seigniorial hauteur; the heavyweight author, trading blows with Norman Mailer and Bill Buckley; the sage of Ravello, surveying the world from high atop his Amalfi cliff; and Hollywood Vidal, Camelot Vidal, Candidate Vidal, Best Seller Vidal, TV Vidal.

Not an unpleasant way, all in all, to have spent the last three-quarters of the American century.

But to have been Mr. Vidal's biographer–that's a different story. The task is like cleaning up after a messy and riotous party to which one had not been invited. What is to be done with all the sticky wineglasses and the crumpled cocktail napkins scribbled with phone numbers? A life like Mr. Vidal's requires a master raconteur to make any sense of it, and it already has its master raconteur: Mr. Vidal himself. But now along comes Fred Kaplan, the author of previous books on writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James, to give Mr. Vidal his first full-dress biography.

It's a job that had already defeated another author before Mr. Kaplan took it up. In 1985, the late Newsweek columnist Walter Clemons got a $350,000 advance from Little, Brown & Company to write an authorized Gore Vidal biography. He spent years "meeting every famous person I have known" (as Gore Vidal put it in a letter to Louis Auchincloss), without apparently writing a word of the book. It can't have helped matters that, by Mr. Kaplan's account, Clemons' subject hounded him to see the manuscript, anxious for a work that would, he said, halt his "slow fade to black."

Clemons died in 1994, and Mr. Kaplan began his own book the same year–with the wise stipulation this time that Mr. Vidal promise, in writing, not to try to see any of it before publication. And in the meantime, in 1995, Mr. Vidal published a memoir of his first 39 years, Palimpsest , which served up as heaping a plateful of dish as any reader could desire.

Gore Vidal: A Biography is twice as long as Palimpsest and covers Mr. Vidal's entire life, and still somehow feels like a drearier reprise of the same book. The best parts are nearly all recycled from Mr. Vidal's writings: glittering fragments of Palimpsest and other autobiographical works embedded in the thick cement of Mr. Kaplan's own research.

Perhaps the most unexpected thing we learn about Mr. Vidal is that, reassuringly, certain parts of his life have been as humdrum as anyone else's: In between the cocktails at Hyannisport, the grand literary contretemps and the nights of sweet lechery in Rome, he also attended summer camp as a child, wore braces on his teeth, briefly served as personnel director of a plastic-bread-tray factory, and had five polyps removed from his colon.

Writing a first-rate biography is tougher than it looks–it's even tough when the writer is blessed with a colorful subject. Almost anyone's life, when narrated in straight-ahead, just-the-facts fashion, can start to sound much like anyone else's. The last biography I'd read before picking up Mr. Vidal's was one, about the same length, of Rutherford B. Hayes. If you'd asked me beforehand what the two had in common, I probably couldn't have come up with much. But now, after reading Mr. Kaplan's book, the two have started to blur strangely in my mind. The same surreal sunlight of childhood, then the rise to success: a grim slog uphill through a documentary sleet of letters and pay stubs, dinner invitations and medical reports, good press clippings and bad ones.

True, President Hayes' biography did not include, as far as I can recall, anything like the following passages:

"Each day at the beach, … [he] diverted himself with Ethel Merman …"

"Kerouac blew him. Then they rubbed bellies for a while."

"Having heard from Jean Cocteau of a male brothel that Proust had frequented …"

What Mr. Vidal needed, though, wasn't a book that would confirm his already prodigious reputation as an elbow-rubber (and occasional belly-rubber) with history, a kind of haut -goy Zelig. What he needed was a critical biography–critical in either of the two senses of the word. Mr. Kaplan could've put Mr. Vidal's self-mythologizing propensities to the test, or–a more difficult and more important task–tried seriously to define the various cultural roles that he's filled for the past 50 years. He does neither.

At a magazine where I once worked, one to which Mr. Vidal sometimes contributes, the arrival of one of his manuscripts was enough to send fact-checkers screaming from the room. His slapdash way with the details–something he has in common with most world-class anecdotalists–has been a lifelong habit; as a teenager at Phillips Exeter Academy, he boasted to classmates that his mother had a library of 300,000 books and his grandfather 500,000. And Mr. Vidal jokes in the very first sentences of Palimpsest that his memoir, like most others, might aptly be titled A Tissue of Lies .

But Mr. Kaplan–who conducted more than 250 interviews with his subject, "drunk and sober"–happily swallows Mr. Vidal's version of events, rarely presents alternate accounts, and rushes to justify any unattractive behavior. Mr. Vidal's vicious and often excessive feuds with other writers (Capote, Mr. Mailer, Mr. Buckley) draw the bland comment: "Full, active lives inevitably generate grievances, the lives of professional writers especially." None of the facts in Palimpsest , or Mr. Vidal's other autobiographical writings, is directly challenged.

Even in recounting Mr. Vidal's famous sex life–when he was 23, Alfred Kinsey presented him with a copy of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male , with an inscription slyly complimenting him on his "work in the field"–for the most part Mr. Kaplan comes up dry. Sex was, he admits, a sore topic between him and his subject: Mr. Vidal "feared that his straight, comparatively bourgeois biographer would write a biography that got him and his life completely wrong." Once, when Mr. Kaplan asked him if he had slept with a particular acquaintance, Mr. Vidal exploded: "Goddamn it, I think you'll never get it through your head that these sexual things aren't what my life's about and that you'll never understand how we deal with these things in my world."

Still, given Mr. Vidal's own lifelong fascination with other people's erotic predilections–abundantly evident in both his fiction and nonfiction–his biographer shouldn't have folded quite so willingly in the face of this outburst. It's amazing that out of all the hundreds or thousands of people that Mr. Vidal has bedded over the years, Mr. Kaplan doesn't seem to have found one who could tell him about the experience from the other side of things.

Mr. Vidal's private life, though, is ultimately far less interesting than his public persona as a novelist, critic and historian–which has been given short shrift, especially in recent years, with the American press usually preferring to treat him as just another generic celebrity. But he is much stranger than that. He is, in truth, almost a figure of another, pagan era, with his insatiate Neronian hunger for fame and sex, power and art. He also understands America and its past as almost no one else does, or ever has–perhaps because of the way, since he was a child, that history has often seemed to converge on him. As a writer, Mr. Vidal once said, he has been "the black sheep among those great good white flocks of folks who graze contentedly in the amber fields of the Republic." Less black sheep than wolf, actually: He has always, with wicked finesse, given the flocks exactly what they deserved.

In a 1959 essay, "The Twelve Caesars," Mr. Vidal praised the Roman biographer Suetonius, who, "in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tamed creatures, whose great moral task it is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within–for we are both, and to ignore this duality is to invite disaster." In his life and in his writings, Mr. Vidal himself embodies this duality, and quite a few others. He awaits his own Suetonius.