Speaking of the incomparable Gore Vidal, his newest book Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare (Abrams Books) is, if you treasure this sort of thing (which I do), an amazing memoir (more than 500 images) rendered with a variety of artifacts—photographs, letters, manuscripts—from his archives and a great complement to Vidal’s published memoirs, Palimpsest and Point to Point Navigation.

It bears repeating that there is no one like Vidal both in his grasp of American history and the array of mid-century American events with which he was connected: the Kennedys, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hollywood, and his well-publicized feuds with William Buckley and Norman Mailer. Seeing the past 50 years or so through Vidal’s tchotkes is a nonpareil delight. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 20, 2009

Now that I am more kindly disposed toward The Paris Review—the literary institution founded by George Plimpton and a cohort of his pals back in the wild and crazy 1950s—since they have dropped the hyperbolic “DNA of literature” slogan, I am pleased to pass on the news of the newest volume of The Paris Review Interviews (Picador) and in fact, the offering of a slip-covered set of all the extant volumes.

Some of the interviewees in this volume include Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Kurt Vonnegut, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Price, Joan Didion, Gabriel García Márquez, Philip Larkin, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Robert Lowell, Ralph Ellison, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Maya Angelou, Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, and, of course many more.

Old pal Colum McCann, an excitable boy, enthuses:

The Paris Review books should be given out at dinner parties, readings, riots, weddings, galas—shindigs of every shape. And they’re perfect for the classroom too, from high schools all the way to MFA programs. In fact, I run a whole semester-long creative writing class based on the interviews. How else would I get the world’s greatest living writers, living and dead, to come into the classroom with their words of wisdom, folly and fury? These books are wonderful, provocative, indispensable.

While I am at it I feel compelled to make mention of a number of recent interviews that, if not indispensable, are significant by virtue of their subjects. There is no one like Gore Vidal for both his grasp of American history and clear-eyed, unsentimental analysis. His chat in London with Johann Hari features such gems as:

I was like everyone else when Obama was elected—optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated,” he says, “but he’s incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It’s a pity because he’s the first intellectual president we’ve had in many years, but he can’t hack it. He’s not up to it. He’s overwhelmed. And who wouldn’t be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away—and we’re being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense.” The President “wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember—the Republican Party is not a political party. It’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It’s full of hatred. You’re not going to get them aboard. Don’t even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He’s too delicate for that.

And for good measure the Atlantic offers up a snappy Q&A notable for:

In one recent interview, you referred to FDR as a great man.

He was a very great man.

But you opposed his foreign policy.

Well, of course. FDR was damaging the Republic by his imperial ways.

How do you reconcile that with your affection for him?

It’s like saying, “I like you and your wife, but I’m not coming to your house for supper because she’s the worst cook whom I’ve ever submitted to.” Would that be considered misogyny or venom and viciousness? I’m supposedly very vicious, trying to destroy people all the time. I’m simply saying that she may be a wonderful wife, and I adore being with her—but I won’t eat a meal at her house. I have this same problem with Jack Kennedy. He was a good friend—witty, sharp, and very smart. I would rather be with him than practically anybody now alive. But what did he do for us in a thousand days? He invades Cuba, fucks up, and brings the world close to a nuclear collision over the so-called missiles down there in Cuba. Deplorable.

And for good measure:

Who is the best leader in the Democratic Party right now?

Do you mean, Who can give the best speech? Who can raise the most money? Look, I’m not a sentimentalist. Nor am I a romantic. I don’t believe in the Great Man theory of history. Great men come along very seldom—and when they do, it’s pretty bloody. But, as once observed, God looks after alcoholics, little children, and the United States of America.

Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridien) reportedly finds interviews anathema (which explains their dearth), but he recently sat down with John Jurgensen and director John Hillcoat (The Road) in San Antonio and chatted about this and that including the forthcoming theatrical release of the film based on The Road. My favorite quote:

WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [my son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

Recently I mentioned Umberto Eco’s latest project and book and coincidentally Der Spiegel published a detailed conversation with Don Umberto that is most illuminating indeed. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 20, 2009

Novelist Philip Caputo (Acts of Faith, A Rumor of War) skillfully interweaves the post-9/11 reality of drug cartels and immigrant hordes with the early 20th-century world of the Mexican-U.S. border in a multigenerational tale. The lives of a grieving widower, an illegal Mexican alien, and various narcotraficantes—as well as the hordes who give this story, Crossers (Knopf), its name—interact to form the best story set in this volatile landscape that I have read since I chanced to discover Don Winslow’s great novel, The Power of the Dog. The border has its own culture and taxonomy, and Caputo’s novel displays that in its manifold forms—along with a serviceable plot and sympathetic characters. And beyond the border of his recent fiction Caputo has logged some serious investigative time to write a compelling complement to Crossers that cautions: “The stakes for the U.S. are high, especially as the prospect of a failed state on our southern border begins to seem all too real.” In the piece he spotlights a pandemic of slaughter that has claimed 14,000 lives amidst a struggle between drug lords, police, the army, politicians, and C.I.A.-sponsored operatives, and he asserts:

Of the many things Mexico lacks these days, clarity is near the top of the list. It is dangerous to know the truth. Finding it is frustrating. Statements by U.S. and Mexican government officials, repeated by a news media that prefers simple story lines, have fostered the impression in the United States that the conflict in Mexico is between Calderón’s white hats and the crime syndicates’ black hats…

What, then, accounts for the carnage, the worst Mexico has suffered since the revolution, a century ago? To be sure, many of the dead have been cartel criminals. Some were killed in firefights with the army, others in battles between the cartels for control of smuggling routes, and still others in power struggles within the cartels. The toll includes more than 1,000 police officers, some of whom, according to Mexican press reports, were executed by soldiers for suspected links to drug traffickers. Conversely, a number of the fallen soldiers may have been killed by policemen moonlighting as cartel hit men, though that cannot be proved. Meanwhile, human-rights groups have accused the military of unleashing a reign of terror—carrying out forced disappearances, illegal detentions, acts of torture, and assassinations—not only to fight organized crime but also to suppress dissidents and other political troublemakers. What began as a war on drug trafficking has evolved into a low-intensity civil war with more than two sides and no white hats, only shades of black. The ordinary Mexican citizen—never sure who is on what side, or who is fighting whom and for what reason—retreats into a private world where he becomes willfully blind, deaf, and above all, dumb.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 19, 2009

(Photo by Robert Birnbaum) Old pal and Hunter College mentor Colum McCann , author of Dancer and Zoli won the National Book Award for fiction for his exuberant recent opus Let the Great World Spin.

Which at the least means future editions of the book will have shiny stickers disquieting the cover art. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 19, 2009

J.C. Hallman, editor of an inspired anthology, The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature (Tin House), has already exhibited a commendable ambidexterity with his nonfiction (soon to be a useless descriptor) tome The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America’s Religious Fringe, a companionable investigation of the chess culture (The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game), and a collection of short fiction (The Hospital for Bad Poets).

The anthology he has assembled of about 30 essays features an all-star list of writers (living and dead)—such as Frank O’Connor, William Gass, Wallace Stegner, Albert Camus, Milan Kundera, Dagoberto Gilb, Seamus Heaney, Susan Sontag, James Wood, E.B. White, Hermann Hesse, Cynthia Ozick, Geoff Dyer, Charles D’Ambrosio, Alan de Botton, Sven Birkerts, and Oscar Wilde—discussing the work of other literary greats, including Marcel Proust, J.D. Salinger, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Malcolm Lowry, T.S. Eliot, Anton Chekhov, Robert Lowell, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry David Thoreau, Cormac McCarthy, Truman Capote, and John Steinbeck. My favorites are Ozick’s declawing of Capote and Gilb’s homage to McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy and Blood Meridien. But really, this volume is just overflowing with delightful prose and thinking.

Beyond the brilliant writing about outstanding writers is Hallman’s astute brief for so-called Creative Criticism. People who know what I am talking about include The Quarterly Conversation:

Quite plainly, we were taken aback by how precisely the author had laid out our own aspirations for criticism in this magazine. The piece, in our humble opinion, points toward an educated, unpretentious form of literary critique that serves both literature and the everyday reader. When people want to know what we’re looking for in this magazine, we’ll point them to Hallman’s essay and those he has collected in the book it prefaces.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 18, 2009

As long as I am banging the drum for short fiction, let me apprise you of the latest addition to the Akashic Books Noir Series: Boston Noir edited by Boston homeboy Dennis Lehane (The Given Day).

Since the 2004 publication of Brooklyn Noir, that series has added some 30 titles, all of which follow the same template: An editor native to the title city assembles other denizens of that city and each provides a story specific to various neighborhoods of the metropolis in question. Featured in this volume: Stewart O’Nan, Patricia Powell, John Dufresne, Lynne Heitman, Don Lee, Russ Aborn, Itabari Njeri, Jim Fusilli, Brendan DuBois, Dana Cameron, and of course Lehane, whose introduction contains this pearl: “That’s the paradox of the new Boston—what’s lost has, in many cases, been taken; what’s left is what people can’t sell. Noir is a genre of loss, of men and women unable to roll with the changing times so the changing times instead roll over them.” —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 17, 2009