Volume 36, Number 12 · July 20, 1989
The Raw and the Cooked
By Robert Towers
Dead Languages
by David Shields
Knopf, 246 pp., $18.95
A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving
Morrow, 543 pp., $19.95
During the past decade in particular, the line separating fiction from autobiography has frequently seemed on the point of being almost erased. Novel after novel has appeared in which not only the background and chronology but also the major events of the first-person narrator's life closely parallel what is publicly known of the author's. The material is offered up uncooked, so to speak, without the subtlety and depth derived from imaginative transmuting of personal experience into fiction. the gains in journalistic immediacy are generally offset by the absence of the play of novelistic invention (a very different matter from autobiographical fibbing in the manner of Ford Madox Ford or Lillian Hellman).
Review, 2797 words
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