AT HOME Essays 1982-1988 <i> by Gore Vidal (Vintage: $9.95)</i>

It’s hardly news that Gore Vidal can write brilliantly when he chooses to, and some of these essays reveal him at his best. With frightening clarity, he strips away the patriotic rhetoric of Oliver North’s defenders and exposes the threat the Iran-Contra affair poses to constitutional government in the United States in “Ollie.”

Unhappily, Vidal rarely chooses to exercise his formidable talents, preferring to fritter away the reader’s time with rambling, self-indulgent pieces attacking writers he describes with such coy circumlocutions as “Crier From the Heart.” A very uneven book from an obviously gifted author who seems bent on preserving his reputation as America’s foremost literary gadfly.