The first task in reviewing Gore Vidal's new apocalypse [Kalki] is to write six paragraphs without using the obvious epithet "mandarin"; the next is to look at the book's relationship to its predecessor and prototype, Messiah, and see how the eschatology business has come along since 1955. Vidal, it is acknowledged, rewrites history to make it appear even less planned, formal and elegant. It cannot be that he revises his fictions with the same purpose. Nor is Kalki a resuscitation or a sequel—the Myra/Myron transform. Rather it is a restatement: in a word, the last days seem closer, grimmer, and more final. Sardony, however, is holding up well….

Mr. Vidal is not averse to napalming a sitting duck, if it merits it. Among his sidelong targets, not all able to retaliate, thank heavens, are US senators ("not only sexually insatiable but impotent"), congress of all kinds, the...