IIOW TO RECAPTURE SELECTIVE MEMORIES
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directions essential to unraveling his mystery. Did AI Gore invent him–
self and then continually re-invent his identity? Did AI Gore's mother
and father invent him as "one-who-must-be-president"? Or is it Bill
Turque who is doing the inventing of AI Gore?
To write a biography of a political person, does Turque need to invent
a fiction parallel to the fictive AI Gore that AI Gore and his parents cre–
a ted? Morris mirrors. Turq ue "unmasks." Morris refracts. Turque
"uncovers." The photo on Turque's dust jacket shows a young Gore,
about ten years old, who was already always himself, a politician win–
ning a race. His arms are thrown up as in victory, just beneath a sign
that is cut in half. "Albert Gore" is only half readable on the campaign's
poster: it signifies, of course, his father's victory. But in the sign system
of this book the half-poster means the half-formed, "half-pint" boy who
will aspire to go beyond his father by becoming a president for him.
ror Turque, Gore is one person in private, another in public. He is
intelligent, moral, and idealistic; and also "is repeatedly prone to pre–
va rica tion, exaggera tion, and a voidance of hard issues." Wi
\I
the" rea I"
AI Gore stand up? Or arc both Cores fictions of ambitious parents who
wanted their son to occupy a role rather than to become a person? A
father's fiction disguised and walking around as if he were a person, like
the nose in Gogol's story? Both Gores are inventions, and mysteries.
Novelistically, Turque begins in the present, October 6,
1999,
when
AI Gore proclaimed a "new day" and transformed himself without so
much as one "Shazam!" Tu rq ue is writing a bout the Gore "twi ns."
Gore One is the man of the dark blue business suits, the occupant of the
White House, partner of Bill Clinton. Now he changes in a flash to Gore
Two and dons a new costume-earth tones, khakis, and cowboy boots.
No longer does he stand stiff and unyielding before a lectern; he loafs
or lounges on a stool, or strides about the astonished audience poking
a wireless microphone at them like a laser. He has left Washington. He
is back in Nashville. Has he gone home to Tennessee where Gore Two
was born? Or did he leave the home of Gore One, Washington D.c:.,
where he was raised in a hotel penthouse and educated at St. Albans?
Both. The AI Gore twins had separate childhoods. Now, in Nashville,
Gore One's massive issue book molders in a back room, as Gore Two
dusts off his autobiography, real and imagined: his father, his mother, his
dead sister, his service in Vietnam.... He spins affectionate stories about
these. Gore Two goes farther. He is a hero, on a heroic quest. He con–
fesses that he and Tipper were Erich Segal's models for
Loue Story;
he
acknowledges that he discovered and unearthed the tragedy at Love
Canal; he admits that he was there when the legislation for the Strategic
