The secret to enjoying this book is to leave all preconceived notions about narrative form, literary propriety and the space/time continuum at the door of THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. Vidal has built a long and respectable career on such well researched, highly detailed and finely wrought historical novels as JULIAN, LINCOLN, 1876 and EMPIRE, but the imp in him periodically runs off the rails and turns out a MYRA BRECKENRIDGE, a DULUTH ... or this nifty little thing.
The plot follows its own outre inner rules of logic. It involves the mannequins in the Smithsonian's First Ladies exhibit, along with their not-so-dummy husbands; Charles Lindbergh; a seriously cracked Abraham Lincoln (now Curator of Ceramics); and an attempt to change history and head off World War II. It defies further description or condensation.
All those carefully-crafted novels about American political history serve Vidal well here. His Presidents pulse with life and (historically accurate) personality. A confrontation between George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt proves riveting, and Grover Cleveland - one of the book's chief delights - behaves exactly as Grover Cleveland reconstituted as part of a museum exhibit and helping to avert nuclear catastrophe.
Vidal writes for the most part with a cool and polished aloofness -- sardonic rather than impassioned. His sharp, shrewd wit gleams and glints throughout, sometimes with gentle, bemused humor; sometimes like a knife. But he holds strong views about what he terms the `American empire', and he drops the mask of unengaged bystander on one point: the tragic waste of young people killed in war. He makes THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION not merely clever but powerful.
[I am reviewing the unabridged audio cassette edition, read by the excellent Grover Gardner.]

Sure, if you can get past his stereotypes of Native Americans and other ethnic groups; his homophobia; and his racism; then you might actually enjoy this book. I take that back. Mr. Vidal is so full of himself, so self-conscious of his sentences, that its impossible to focus on the story. He's always smirking and trying to show why he's smarter than someone else. It might be better if he picked up some of the classics and learned a lesson or two. Is he iconoclastic? No, just close minded.

The back cover of this book was very misleading. I thought there would be a lot of science and philosophy and thought-provocation. However, I found this book to be contrived and the ending to be obvious. I read Vidal's "1876" and found it very dry until the last 30 pages or so. Those 30 pages made "1876" worth-while reading. This book never had that allure. If Black Holes and the Atomic Bomb interest you, the book "Black Holes and Times Warps" had a better description of both.

Centering around a main character named T., The Smithsonian Institution is part science fiction and part historical fact. T. is a child blessed with a gift for mathematics, and is enlisted by the government to help with the Manhattan project in the early 1940's. T. soon finds himself immersed in a world of greater fantasy than reality. He is hamming it up with Abe Lincoln, and discussing physics theories with Albert Einstein. As he searches for a way to end the war and create a nuclear bomb, T. finds that stranger things than normal are happening at the Smithsonian. T. soon finds himself consumed with time travel and changing history to stop a war that he knows will have a deadly outcome for himself. Gore Vidal has written a wildly entertaining book but it is not for the unimaginative. The reader must be willing to follow Vidal on his sidetracks and accept whatever strange conclusion they may have without using the historical reality available for judgement. Anyone who enjoys history and science fiction will enjoy this book, as long as it is not looked to for strict historical accuracy.

This book is Vidal comment on the american society and how it came to be - and could be, and it is about presidency and running the country - and overall, quite philosophical and insightful view on the american condition. I think the other reviewers fail to see the depth of the work.