Volume 51, Number 11 · June 24, 2004
The Awful Truth
By Thomas R. Edwards
Nothing Lost
by John Gregory Dunne
Knopf, 335 pp., $24.95
John Gregory Dunne died of a heart attack on December 30, 2003, a very bad year, not least because it brought so many lies to those who care about truth. Politicians, priests, generals, CEOs, journalists, and mere entertainers kept telling whoppers about what they had been doing. Dunne's first novel was called True Confessions (1977), and as a novelist and essayist he tried to tell the truth, sometimes too vigorously for truth's own good. He cared enough about truth to send the very worst, that is, and his accounts of the national life often made it seem almost paralyzingly ugly, or almost disablingly absurd, or both at once. But with truth, too much is better than not enough.
Review, 3206 words
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