Volume 38, Number 12 · June 27, 1991
Novel History
By Gordon S. Wood
Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)
by Simon Schama
Knopf, 333 pp., $21.00
It was bound to happen. Sooner or later a distinguished historian had to cross over, had to mingle the writing of fiction with the writing of history. The circumstances were ripe, the pressures were enormous. Everyone else was doing it. Novelists had long been blending fact with fiction without apology. They not only set their invented characters among real historical figures, but they had these authentic historical figures do and say things they had never done. When E.L. Doctorow was asked whether Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit had ever actually met as they did in his novel Ragtime, he replied, 'They have now.' Journalists and TV writers have been doing it, creating hybrids called 'faction' and 'docu-drama.' Television even began simulating the news, adding made-up pictures to otherwise apparently lifeless words.
Review, 4872 words
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