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Eric's script is ostensibly about Helena and Artamisa, two gorgeous siblings who squirm their way to royal fame and power in the Persian-dominated Greek cities of the 4th century B.C. Murray Morris sees them mainly as Lana and Ava in a huge marble bathtub, but Eric shifts the film's focus to the sisters' half brother, Herostratus. Betrayed to the Persians as a Greek rebel by Helena, who is also his lover, Herostratus dashes both sisters' dreams of immortal fame by burning the spectacular Temple of Diana. In one rash act he has overshadowed his conniving sisters and secured for himself a notable historic role as an arsonist.
Contemplating the script and his relationship to Eric and Erika gives Vidal yet another opportunity to do his Epicurus act: pleasure seen as the beginning and end of the good life, death seen as nothing more than the beginning of a blessed reduction into soulless, primordial atoms. He observes that power is customarily pursued for its own sake and dismisses idealism from political behavior. Wearily he views America as a violent, uncivilized land full of literal-minded people with no sense of paradox. Its writers are inferior to those of Europe, ditto its food, and its attitude toward taboos is infantile. On and on Vidal goes, repeating much of the same material he has so often used in magazine articles and on TV talk shows. Two Sisters is ingenious, and its prose is as elegant as any being written today. But, after a while, even those who are sympathetic with Vidal's various disenchantments may begin to wonder why he has bothered to fatten them again on this parodic carcass of a novel.
· R.Z. Sheppard
*Nina Auchincloss Steers is the stepsister of Jacqueline Onassis and Lee Radziwill. She is also Vidal's half sister.