Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nothing in his past accomplishments suggests that Safire would produce a tedious and seemingly endless work of fiction. In fact, Full Disclosure (1977), his first novel, was a sprightly, best-selling account of a beleaguered White House not entirely unlike Nixon's. But Freedom is another, infinitely longer story. Subtitled A Novel of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, the book inches its way from May 1861, shortly after the Confederate forces fire on Fort Sumter, to Jan. 1, 1863, when President Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. This takes just under 1,000 pages, followed by about 130 more, which...
Freedom, in other words, is a case of divided loyalties, not only in its subject matter -- a nation at bitter war with itself -- but in its execution. For in trying to pay equal respect to the demands of truth and fiction, Safire strands his novel in a no-man's-land between concrete facts and illuminating imagination. He recognizes this dilemma and tries to pass it off as a virtue: "The reader of any historical novel asks, 'How much of this is true?' " But many readers surely have more urgent questions, such as "How much of this is vivid...
Ultimately, the urge to inform overrides the obligation to entertain. Perhaps punditry is not the best preparation for fiction. Safire the columnist is entitled to his belief that the stuff of life can be summed up in political thrusts and parries. Safire the novelist would have been better off if he had allowed himself, and his imagination, more freedom...
Unlike so many of her contemporaries, Oates has the imagination and the ambition to attempt a big novel. But she overdoes it, as if in the grip of a writing demon. Frequently the book seems compiled rather than composed, facts and fiction accreting into a formidable but unshapely mass. There are even chunks on boxing in the '50s, as if the fight game had the same historical impact as the Rosenberg trial or the policies of "Engine Charley" Wilson, the Secretary of Defense. You Must Remember This takes lots of wild swings; it is what happens when a fearless slugger...
Columnist William Safire turns to fiction with a 1,125- page Civil War novel but is swamped by facts. -- A powerful Joyce Carol Oates...