"A Secure Ego..."

or, "What's Up, Doc?"

Here's Eyman on Vidal:

The interesting thing about Gore Vidal, who died Tuesday night a the age of 86 after more than six decades in the public eye, was that he was so many things, often all at the same time: novelist, essayist, screenwriter, playwright, political candidate, political scold, pansexualist, public intellectual, and, finally and most lastingly, Bitch Queen of American letters.

That he wasn’t equally proficient at everything he did was disguised by his personality - a malicious purr of aphoristic ill-will. That tone preceded him in his hundreds of television appearances and it carried over into his prose.

Vidal’s personality was so strong that his novels tended to be weak - there were very few characters whose conversation didn’t resemble Gore Vidal’s, and a general focus on man’s innate passion for power. There was rarely a sense that his characters were living, breathing people, perhaps because Vidal considered himself a man of ideas and never quite give up the idea of fiction as a variation on the lecture.

A few notable exceptions: Julian, his novel of the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity, which, despite Vidal’s general amusement at the very idea of God, emerged as a triumph, and Burr, about Aaron Burr, who not only betrayed his country, but killed Alexander Hamilton, and who undoubtedly appealed to Vidal’s fondness for rogues.

Contrastingly, Vidal’s essays, on subjects ranging from High Literature to modern politics, are as good as anything written in this country, and will undoubtedly constitute his claim on literary posterity.
...
Leavening his increasing crankiness was his humor, which was most savage when dealing with other writers, who had the temerity to work in his vineyard (“The three saddest words in the world: Joyce Carol Oates”), or politicians, who, following in the footsteps of Mark Twain, he regarded as a predominantly criminal class.

He was at all times a great character and, when it came to non-fiction, often a great writer. He is quite irreplaceable.