DAVID SIDORSKY
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nam War and Nabokov's staunch anti-Communism, their ways separated.
On a Fourth of July holiday in the early
[970S,
Epstein went in search of
cigars to the Hotel Ritz in Paris and encountered Nabokov celebrating in
the bar. Their reunion that night at dinner, joined by Nabokov's wife,
Vera, was friendly. Epstein offered a toast to the company of three who
shared this moment of exile on America's national birthday. Nabokov
responded by offering a toast to then-president Richard Nixon, the anath–
ema of radical chic. Epstein informs us that under the circumstances, he
felt obliged to drink
to
the health of Richard Nixon, for it would have
been gauche and certainly unchic to decline a toast proffered by Nabokov,
a literary figure who characteristically combined a sense of elegance with
a penchant for testing the limits of form and experience.
Despite its various episodes of humor and irony, Kimball's narrative
is ultimately not a comic tale. One of the decade's central accomplish–
ments, according to Kimball, was its delegitimation of America's sense
of its own value.
Kimball shows how the utopianism of the Left was combined with
the indictment of American actions in the Vietnam War to delegitimate
major aspects of American society. He writes:
As the sixties evolved, it became increasingly clear that what was at
stake was not only the war. The real issue was our way of life: what
used to be called without apology "the American way of life," with
its social and political institutions, its moral assumptions, its unspo–
ken confidences about what mattered. One measure of the change
wrought by this cultural offensive is the fact that even now, thirty
or more years on, it is nearly impossible for anyone with a college
education to speak of "the American way of life" without irony.
Thus Kimball's portraits draw him to the issue of the permanent
weakening of the fabric of American society.
KIMBALL'S INTERPRETATION of the sixties as a historical narrative pro–
vides a challenge to Fukuyama's sociological method. On the one hand,
Fukuyama's faith in sociology would indicate a belief that there can be a
predictive science of history derived from the evidence of social structures.
More particularly, Fukuyama seeks to identify the underlying causes of
social events and to connect them with the development of human nature
so as to predict the reversibility of the Great Disruption. Yet Fukuyama is
himself aware that the recognized failure of Hegelian or Marxist histori-
