Here is an extraordinary portrait of one of the most complicated-and misunderstood-figures among the Founding Fathers. Burr has pointed speeches lamenting the lack of ""civilization on this God-forsaken continent."" ""Between the dishonest canting of Jefferson: and the poisonous egotism of Hamilton, this state has been no good from the beginning."" These add a certain weight and irony to the novel, considering our mood of national discontent and a troubled bicentennial looming in the wings.For readers who can't get enough of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, Gore Vidal's stunning novel about Aaron Burr, the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel-and who served as a successful, if often feared, statesman of our fledgling nation. Interspersed between sections of the memoirs of Burr is the long chronicle of a reporter in pursuit of the truth about the Colonel during the last years of the latter's life. Then, too, Vidal uses one of the oldest of gambits, a device he deplores in other novelists, ""the sort of storytelling that propels the hero from one person to the next person, asking questions"". That ""summer at Rutgers,"" on the other hand, has the grain of truth that comes from a writer's experience. For while the intricacies of plot, the political climate, the social pace and prejudices of the day are admirably drawn, never for a moment does the reader forget that he is in the presence of, after all, an entertaining invention. But perhaps it does answer the question Vidal poses to the questioner's disadvantage. It is a clever book, the elegant conception of a spirited professional. Vidal, however, fleshes him in fine classical fettle, the full flower of 18th-century rationalism sprouting in his head.
Burr is a dark figure, a prey of romanticists. These remarks, as it turns out, appear to have been intended as a prelude to a recreation of his own: the career of Aaron Burr, vice-president under Jefferson, assailant of Hamilton in a famous duel on Weehawk Heights, alleged arch-conspirator in a plot to set up a kingdom somewhere in Mexico.
Writing in The New York Review of Books recently, Gore Vidal wondered why so ""valuable a genre"" as the historical novel should be disdained by ""our solemn writers,"" when ""what happened last summer at Rutgers,"" if presented in a dull novel under the rubric of ""realism,"" should be thought superior.
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