SOURCE: “Don't Look Back,” in Times Literary Supplement, July 29, 1994, p. 19.

In the following review, Woods offers an unfavorable assessment of Vidal's revised version of The City and the Pillar, which, according to Woods, muddles rather than improves the original. Woods also comments on A Thirsty Evil, which he regards as significant to the history of gay literature, though the individual stories are unremarkable.

The City and the Pillar was Gore Vidal’s third novel, published in 1948 when he was only twenty-one. It upset his grandfather and determined his future reputation as a maverick. He cannot have been surprised or disappointed.

The emotional impetus of the book comes from a bucolic idyll near its start, when two schoolfriends, Jim Willard and Bob Ford, go camping together just after graduation. During a healthily buddyish session of sun-bathing, wrestling and skinny-dipping—that most elemental affirmation of American boyhood—they suddenly find...