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The Smithsonian Institution

by
Gore Vidal

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Smithsonian Institution
Author:	Gore Vidal
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1998
Length:	260 pages
Availability:	The Smithsonian Institution - US
	The Smithsonian Institution - UK
	The Smithsonian Institution - Canada
	La ménagerie des hommes illustres - France
	La institución smithsoniana - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

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Our Assessment:

B- : a fun premise, but underdeveloped and too all over the place

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The LA Times	F	15/3/1998	Merle Rubin
The New Criterion	.	5/1998	Brooke Allen
The NY Times	.	19/3/1998	C.Lehmann-Haupt
The NY Times Book Rev.	B	1/3/1998	Christopher Benfey
The Observer	B+	11/10/1998	Andrew Maar
The Sunday Times	.	4/10/1998	Tom Deveson
The Times	.	8/10/1998	Douglas Kennedy
The Times	.	16/10/1999	Martin Higgins
World Lit. Today	.	Winter/2000	Marvin J. LaHood

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, and most rather unsure what exactly to make of it

  From the Reviews:

"In some respects, it could be said that Vidal’s latest novel is the dernier cri of many of the themes, tendencies and obsessions found in his previous work. It reflects both his fascination with American history and his fondness for bizarre inventions. (...) Written in the gee-whiz style of old-fashioned pulp adventure stories aimed at the teen and preteen boys’ market, this is a novel that adults may find rather tough going. I’m not even sure teenagers would take to it. The plot is preposterous, hard to follow and, as it turns out, not worth the trouble of having tried to follow. (...) In a bad way, this is a very personal book. (...) By some mysterious defeat of his usually fertile imagination, Vidal has managed to produce a book that is silly without being entertaining, faintly offensive without being provocative." - Merle Rubin, The Los Angeles Times

"Vidal has obviously been dabbling in the work of Stephen Hawking, and his slight, rather goofy plot nearly gets buried under a morass of amateurish scientific speculation on the nature of time and other mysteries. Science fiction is not really Vidal's thing, and the reader must simply plod on until the author turns to historical comedy, which he brings off with far more elan. (...) But in fact The Smithsonian Institution never pretends to be much more than a facetious play on American politics and history. It is full of private jokes and autobiographical elements that will be quickly recognized by readers of Vidal's bitchy memoir Palimpsest. And as satire it is funny but pointless, not so much Jonathan Swift as Ronald Firbank" - Brooke Allen, The New Criterion

"Vidal does astonishing work just keeping us oriented in his hall of see-through mirrors. (...) Despite its seeming zaniness, The Smithsonian Institution is appealing in several ways. (...) At the heart of The Smithsonian Institution is a dramatization of Aristophanes' conceit. For all the novel's witty arabesques of plot, T.'s passion to make himself whole is what finally lends the story its substance." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"(A) strange confection of science fiction, historical costume romance, political satire and veiled autobiography. (...) Vidal's mumbo-jumbo about the space-time continuum, with some cloning and genetic engineering thrown in (...) isn't much more sophisticated than H.G.Wells's century-old time machine, but it's adequate to the job. (...) The Smithsonian Institution is a light entertainment to while away a winter weekend; it will go on no one's short list of Vidal's best books. (...) Bu the jokes, good and bad, keep coming, and the Presidents really are brought to life. Vidal's eye for the freaks and foibles of Washington has retained it sharpness." - Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review

"This is a jeu d'esprit, an iridescent bubble of a book (.....) I'm not sure I understood every turn of the tale, I don't suppose I found a boring paragraph anywhere. It doesn't have the solidity or even the anger of Vidal's great novels. It ends unsatisfactorily. But, against that, it is full of interesting conversation about the nature of things and it contains political comedy of a kind no one else in Anglo-Saxondom is writing. If, at times, it is deliberately silly, then it is a silly book that is strictly for grown-ups." - Andrew Maar, The Observer

"Among all the metaphysical fun, Vidal is making thoughtful and plausible observations about the promises and failures of history. (...) Yet for all its uncompromising thesis, the book has great charm and readability. It does not have the preening earnestness of Martin Amis's engagement with alternative chronology. Vidal's playful tone is more like that of an adult E Nesbit" - Tom Deveson, The Sunday Times

"Vidal's fanciful two-step through the institutional panorama of American life is both a mutinous debunking of national myths, and a clever variation on the "what if... '" theme (.....) For all its capriciousness, The Smithsonian Institution isn't merely a shrewd entertainment. Lurking below its polished surface is an angry homily about America 's botched opportunities, and its ongoing delusional obsessions with its own righteousness. And Vidal's melancholic despair about his nation's failed ideals leaves you thinking: this man is, at heart, the best sort of patriot." - Douglas Kennedy, The Times

"(A) rare mix of history, politics and quantum physics plus a White House love affair. (...) Vidal cleverly satirises the hubris of American hegemony but the description of string theory may lose some travellers along the way." - Martin Higgins, The Times

"[T] turns out to be a composite of Vidal himself and the author's lover at St. Alban's, Jimmie Trimble, who died in World War II. It is this autobiographical infusion that gives this not so great novel some warmth. Vidal's knowledge of and lifelong interest in American history add substance to the novel." - Marvin J. LaHood, World Literature Today

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

The Smithsonian Institution opens on Good Friday, 1939, with thirteen-year-old orphaned boy T., a student at St. Albans School, having been summoned to the venerable institution, where he is invited to: "penetrate the mystery of the Smithsonian, which is the mystery of life itself ...". He is a mathematical prodigy, and he's been brought here for his genius and his way of seeing things -- the how and why not always clear in his mind, but nevertheless a sense of understanding there, with his rawness advantageous: as someone explains:

You're still too young to see darkly, grown man's usual condition. Einstein was very young, too, when he broke into a mystery that has always been as plain as the sun at noon. But it took an unclouded youthful eye to see it and, of course, he only broke into a part of it, as you have into another part

There's more to this Smithsonian than meets the general visitor's eye, not least with many figures of the past still very much alive, in some sense -- and in the off-hours --, here: among those T. meets, living and ... after-living, are Charles Lindbergh, Grover Cleveland, various Roosevelts, and an Abraham Lincoln (albeit only a slight variation on the historical original). And then there's the possibility of time-travel -- a thermostat that allows T. to 'see' into the past and future and, eventually, the possibility of physically visiting another time, as when T. goes to meet Woodrow Wilson in 1910. It's not just time, either; there's some flexibility to the whole space-time continuum, the Smithsonian then a starting point as portal to other locales, which plays a significant role in the resolution(s) of the story.
As the novel's opening line and the date when the action begins suggest, these are turbulent times: very clearly: "War clouds were gathering over Europe". And there's this weapon that has been in development in secret: "a bomb of incalculable power. What you have done is found a way to release not only the power of the atom". As T. recognizes when he learns the details, they haven't gotten the physics quite right yet:

"Whoever's in charge," said T, "the whole world blows up when you set off that bomb you're planning to build."
"Yes," said Oppenheimer, with no apparent emotion. "That's my calculation. But no one else agrees."

T. is determined to iron things out there -- and that's just straightforward science, which should be manageable. Still, even the development of a bomb which doesn't start an endless chain reaction poses a huge danger -- indeed, T. is convinced: "In time -- pretty soon in time for us -- nuclear weapons are going to kill off the human race" So he decides more also needs fixing:

the Second World War -- as opposed to the just plain European or Japanese wars -- must not, in T.'s urgent view, take place because, for reasons he could not yet visualize, it would have almost the same effect in the end as the chain reaction in the desert. There would be a slower, subtler, but no less deadly effect.

Here, too, he thinks he knows what to do: "if my calculations are correct we can reorganize time, or at least a section of it, and prevent the war". Simply put:

I do think a number of events could be so changed at one of the -- well, crossroads along the way so that we'd then have no war where nuclear weapons were developed and used.

But, of course, fiddling with the past can have unintended effects, as the little fiddle they then decide on -- preventing Woodrow Wilson from becoming president -- indeed does.
As Einstein -- yes, he shows up, too -- eventually complains to T.:

"You have done a monstrous thing. I have said that God does not play dice with the universe; now, due to this -- diabolic intervention, you play dice with the universe. Or at least with our time-space."

Of course, that is what the fiction-writer does, positing and playing out different scenarios, playing at (re)shaping events and reality. Vidal does so with this novel also in a (futile, fictional) attempt to re-write part of his own reality: as widely noted, T. is clearly based not only on Vidal himself but as much so on his schoolboy-crush Jimmie Trimble -- his "other half" ("What I was not, he was, and the other way around"), as Vidal wrote in his memoir, Palimpsest --, who was killed in action in the Second World War; when he can't stop war, T. nevertheless steps in to try to save ... T.
Vidal gathers quite a few prominent historical figures -- especially the former presidents -- and plays around amusingly with them, stuck in this strange Smithsonian limbo, where they are of their time but also (can) have some awareness of current goings-on. T. is closest to Grover Cleveland's widow -- called Frankie, or also Squaw here, and permanently aged twenty-two --, who also initiates him sexually -- in an early comic scene that suggests that, despite its thirteen-year-old hero and time-travel fantasies, this isn't quite YA-fare:

"I'm a virgin," he gasped, "but I'm ready." With a powerful thrust, he manfully entered, of two possible holes, the wrong one.
"Not there, there !" Woman's prehistoric, nay, primeval, cry sounded yet again and not, alas, as woman knows, for the last time in the tragic human story. Dutifully, Veal withdrew and again aimed blindly through moist thickets to full blissful bullhood in the absolute right place at the absolute right time. Bull's-eye is no idle Wittgensteinian concept, he realized, in the field, as it were.

       In other ways -- okay, in that one, too -- The Smithsonian Institution is very much a boys' adventure-tale (down also then, with a smirk, to the sex-encouraging advice T. gets, one of the potential upsides of the situation he finds himself in at the novel's conclusion: "I would encourage you to disseminate yourself as widely as possible. In a sense, you are the marker on this crossroad of time. One of your descendants, with a fully developed third lobe to the brain, is apt to be the next").
       The double- (or multiples-)theme also features prominently -- not only of different possible paths of history but of individuals themselves. Not least, T. worries about time passing outside the Smithsonian while he toils within -- but life goes on with him there as well, in a sort of twin-track. Six clones in the Smithsonian -- look-alikes, if not quite as bright -- also feature, with their purpose (creepily) revealed in the resolution.
       Unfortunately, the science -- which includes nods to (Vidal's limited conception of) string theory, as well as the nature of the Smithsonian's semi-alive exhibit 'dummies', and the development of a third brain lobe -- is rather hard to believe, as presented; it's more 1930s science fiction than the much more technically and theoretically refined sort that readers have long since come to expect. As is, it seems (crudely) put together simply to let Vidal achieve his ends -- the novel's resolutions: what happens to the world, and to T. (or rather: the T.s). The conclusion is actually among the most satisfying aspects of the novel -- but even aside from the squirrely science it's a bit of a slog to get there. Some of Vidal's invention, especially involving the historical figures, is quite amusing -- not least in having Douglas MacArthur become a kind of Tokyo Rose in a changed timeline, spouting Japanese war-propaganda -- but he tries to juggle too much more beyond that.
       In outline -- and conclusion -- The Smithsonian Institution has lots of promise, but as written it's a pretty middling work. There are fun ideas and scenes throughout, but it's just not fully worked out and realized -- and not nearly as fun or exciting (or thought-provoking) as it could or should be.

- M.A.Orthofer, 25 December 2025

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Links:

The Smithsonian Institution:

Mariner Books publicity page
Abacus publicity page
Smithsonian Institution - official site

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Contemporary American fiction at the complete review
See Index of Science Fiction and Fantasy books
See Index of Real People in Works of Fiction

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About the Author:

American author Gore Vidal lived 1925 to 2012.

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