Gore Vidal's Lincoln

As a big fan of hefty, minutely-detailed, well-researched biographies, I approach fictional portrayals of historical figures with skepticism. It’s very difficult, or so I think, to realistically fictionalize real people whose real life stories we know by heart. (I get the idea of “humanizing” our heroes, but our heroes are our heroes because they were somehow more than human. Or maybe I just want to keep seeing them that way.) Some directors rightfully don’t even try. Props to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, for instance, for not making Michael Jordan a character in Air; they only briefly showed the back of his head. Props also to the right director/actor combo, who can sometimes nail it (Denzel Washington as Malcolm X) or get close enough (Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace). But most of the time talented actors playing everyday legends make us cringe. Michael Douglass as Franklin, Paul Giamatti as John Adams, Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon, or any movie about the Civil War, to name just a few. Even Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln came up short, hence my skepticism when I picked up Gore Vidal’s literary attempt to turn our 16th president into a character. And yet, kudos, Mr. Vidal. I felt the same feelings reading the novel that I get when I follow Lincoln's life in a factual biography, the sense that, wow, here's a real person and this actually happened. Vidal relied almost exclusively on primary sources to craft his story, including dialogue, and it shows. Reading his book was like watching an exclusive behind-the-scenes documentary, and everyone’s there: Lincoln, his family, his secretaries, his cabinet, Wilkes Booth and his conspirators, the Spragues, even that rascal Roscoe Conkling. Hail to the chief, and hail to one of the greatest historical fiction writers ever.