Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...deemed a resounding success even before it hits the best-seller lists. Not only has Hollywood paid $2.1 million for the film rights. Better yet, Carcaterra's self-described "true story" has prompted newspaper articles containing charges that parts or all of the book are simply the author's inventions...
...surprised that anyone would doubt that all this actually happened to him and his friends. "It's hurtful, in truth," he says. "When some people with nothing but their own opinions don't believe it, there is little you can do to combat them." At the same time, the author admits that nearly all the details in Sleepers are fictitious, intentionally altered to disguise his friends -- only the one he calls Michael, he says, is still living -- and Hell's Kitchen sources. "You have to change dates, names, places, people. The way they looked; you have to make them look...
...author thus dismisses objections from the Manhattan D.A.'s office that Michael, with only six months' experience there, could never have been assigned to a homicide case. Such nitpickers are missing the point. In reality, as opposed to the book, Michael was not a six-month assistant D.A., Carcaterra says, and he was not necessarily working in Manhattan either. "The what, where and when these things happened," he insists, "were not as important to me as the fact that they did happen...
...since Joe McGinniss began dreaming up things that Senator Edward M. Kennedy might have thought, in The Last Brother (1993), has there been such an elastic and accommodating definition of nonfiction as Carcaterra's. Truth matters, but it has nothing to do with petty details. An author who wanted to write about the Yalta Conference, say, but not about Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, would remain equally true to the topic by naming the principals Larry, Curly and Moe and placing them in a Tijuana saloon...
That's pretty much the reaction provoked by a reading of Sleepers. Internal contradictions pile up. "We followed every pro sport with religious fervor and adolescent passion," Carcaterra writes on one page. On the next: "We cared little for Knicks basketball and barely tolerated Giants football." The author writes emotionally of a Greek hot-dog vendor he and his friends robbed: "We never saw the tiny, airless fourth-floor room he lived in, a 40-minute walk from his station, its only comfort a tattered collection of pictures from home, crudely taped to the wall nearest the worn mattress...