Empire.

• Author: Waldman, Steven

Empire.

Say, did you know that President McKinley would casually drop a silk handkerchief over his wife's head during dinner parties when she had an epileptic seizure? Or that Theodore Roosevelt became vice president largely because the New York Republican boss wanted the pesky governor out of his state? Or that President McKinley prevented William Jennings Bryan from campaigning in 1898 by refusing to grant him a discharge from the Army? I must confess that the reason I love Gore Vidal's novels is that I share his appetite for historical morsels like these that appear in his latest, Empire.* His books are peppered with anecdotes that are as fun as they are revealing.

* Empire. Gore Vidal. Random House, $22.50.

Really taking delight in Empire, or any historical novel, means having a certain faith in the author. In other genres, the author's credibility is of secondary importance. So what if the poet Ezra Pound spent the last years of his life in Washington's St. Elizabeths hospital for the mentally ill; it doesn't make his Cantos any less powerful. But when you pick up a historical novel you know it's a mix of fact and fiction; you hope the author will sort out the two and that the history will be largely accurate. If the author doesn't do that, the thrill is gone. The work becomes distracting, leaving one wondering what's real and what isn't. You lose the great strength of historical novels: the feeling that You Are There.

That's why Gore Vidal ought to shut up. He should skip the book tours, stop writing for popular magazines, and refuse interviews. Shortly before I began Empire, I made the mistake of picking up a Washington Post profile of Vidal in which he explained how the world is run by a cabal of bankers and publishers. He went on to call on the U.S. and the Soviet Union to unite economically as white people to fight what he's called the "grimly determined asiatics.' I put the article down.

Up to that point I had carefully avoided reading his outrageous Nation article accusing Norman Podhoretz of retaining "first loyalty' to Israel instead of being an "assimilated American.' That may be Vidal's idea of irony-- his editor Victor Navasky says it was--but he is so reckless and so offensive so much of the time that you cannot easily discern wit from idiocy. In an essay for Newsweek on the Iran-contra scandal, Vidal not only excoriates Oliver North, but the entire Marine Corps. Add to this Vidal's notorious histrionics, like his squabbling with Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, and you're pretty fed up. He's like some drunk who shows up mysteriously at your party, scarfs your cheese, drinks your booze, and keeps picking fights until you send him off in a cab.

Yet Vidal's novels are so well executed that you forget he's the same loon you just saw on "Dick Cavett.' The great irony of Vidal's writing is that his fiction is more truthful than his non-fiction. Many outrageous lines in Empire turn out to be nearly exact quotes from the letters, diaries, and news accounts of the times. Remarkably, he even deals sensitively with anti-semitism, having one sympathetic character support Captain Dreyfus, the Jewish officer convicted of...