When Heather Neilson began studying Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, few scholars did. She asked him why, and received a bracing response. “I think perhaps I'm too big,” he told her. “They can only deal with small writers” (240). Vidal studies has since attracted contributions and attained some coherence. A number of books now discuss his writings about sexuality; some analyse him as a cultural figure. Surprisingly few, however, unpick his politics. Dennis Altman surveyed late-career ideas about empire in Gore Vidal's America (2005), Stephen Harris examined Gore Vidal's Historical Novels and the Shaping of American Political Consciousness (2005), and Jon Wiener's recent I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics (2012) provided a valuable collection of interviews. But Neilson's monograph is the first to consider politics across the formidable breadth of Vidal's writings.

The author's main argument is that Vidal's works are “preoccupied with the nature of power – whence power derives, how it is manifested, and how it can be constrained” (32). It's a convincingly pervasive theme, which recurs throughout Vidal's novels, essays, plays, and autobiographies. Neilson further suggests that his writings are indebted to encounters with Shakespeare, and that his historical novels “focus directly on three interwoven themes which permeate Shakespeare's history plays: the nature of ‘report’ and reputation; the notion of ‘true’ and ‘false’ fathers and sons; and the legitimacy (or otherwise) of authority” (26). She tackles Vidal's oeuvre through the chronology of his subjects. There are three parts: “ancient worlds,” America from Revolution to late nineteenth-century empire, and America in the twentieth century.

Neilson gains much by taking Vidal's classicism seriously. This is not uncharted territory, and builds, for instance, on James Tatum's graceful 1992 essay “The Romanitas of Gore Vidal.” But Neilson also brings out the importance of pre- and anti-Christian themes in Vidal's ancient worlds, and highlights their engagement with the primal will to power. She is a stylish reader of Vidal. Meeting swaggering flippancy with elegant scrutiny, she gets underneath the “mixture of revelation and deflection” (15) that characterizes his prose, and finds unity in his treatment of power as an aspect and product of charismatic performance. She argues that, especially in Vidal's “Narratives of Empire” (Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and The Golden Age), “the trope of politics as a form of theatre predominates” (84). The novels are indeed stuffed with self-fashioning, politicians-as-actors, and a sharp sense of stage.

The specifically Shakespearean overtones are most plausible in Lincoln. Vidal had the drama of Civil War Washington, a large company of lively characters, tragedy, history, and a protagonist who both embodied power and quoted Shakespeare. Neilson sees Vidal's Lincoln as a composite of Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Richard II (121). Yet Lincoln is also set somewhat apart from the “Narratives of Empire,” written after 1876, but set before it. It is the least fictional and most historical novel in the series, with the fewest recurring invented characters. Neilson finds allusions to Shakespeare in the other novels, but it is not clear that the Bard is always central to Vidal's writings on power. In Empire, for instance, Henry James and drawing-room delicacy seem to matter more.

“Power” is, of course, a slippery category, which Neilson confessedly does not treat as a political scientist. For her it is a literary theme about “the ability of one political actor to get another actor to do what it wants” (xi). This has useful flexibility, but in practice Neilson's focus on theatrical performance comes at the cost of other approaches to Vidal's politics. His engagements with liberalism or republicanism are not much discussed, and we continue to lack historical accounts of his political thought. Nor is sex seen in terms of power, though Vidal often discussed it this way (as in his 1979 essay “Sex Is Politics”). Nor is his political career, which included two attempts at elective federal office, given more than brief analysis.

Still, when it comes to Vidal's politics, Neilson demonstrates that his representations of political power are a source of rich insight. Her incisive study will engage scholars of Vidal, and should draw wider attention to one of the most trenchantly heterodox perspectives on American politics that we have. She leaves the impression that thinking about power both compelled and constrained Vidal's writing. For his best characters are often not the ones who have power, but the ones who almost have it, linger near it, sometimes snatch it. “A study of the meaning of power in Vidal's work and life,” Neilson writes, “is necessarily in part a study of frustrated aspirations” (15–16).