Volume 32, Number 20 · December 19, 1985
Three-Part Inventions
By Robert Towers
World's Fair
by E.L. Doctorow
Random House, 288 pp., $17.95
Galápagos
by Kurt Vonnegut
Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 295 pp., $16.95
Where She Was
by Anderson Ferrell
Knopf, 141 pp., $13.95
In a world of ideal literary forms, autobiography, however fictionalized in certain of its aspects, would exist as a genre distinct from the novel, however much the latter might be derived from the author's personal experience. Often the distinction is clear enough: for a variety of reasons involving style, rhetoric, narrative organization, and the presentation of the protagonist, we are not likely to regard Stop-Time as a novel or Look Homeward, Angel as an autobiography. When a blurring of the two genres occurs, the result can be dismaying if issues of public significance are concerned (Lillian Hellman's memoirs come to mind—just where does the purportedly factual account of an episode slide into self-aggrandizing fantasy?) or harmless enough, as in the case of Doctorow's World's Fair, a work of substantially autobiographical prose that is called a novel.
Review, 3500 words
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