Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...began as a diary . . . little by little it began to turn itself into a story." So Katherine Anne Porter described the act of writing, and her alchemy of experience into story is as old as fiction itself. Some 3,000 instances of the process appear in The Originals, a witty and thorough compendium that traces novels, plays and tales back to their sources. No matter how extravagant the characters seem on the page, claims British Journalist William Amos, every one of them was based on an actual person...
Margaret's revised version of her life introduces characters who were once secondary in her fiction but who assume a new importance. Dr. Flood, remarried and remorseful that in his career he "has hoed a narrow row," assigns Margaret's case to a talented younger colleague. An operation seems in order. Whether it succeeds or not, the patient wants to explain to her only child, Bayard, 16, the son of her second marriage, why his parents broke up and why his once aristocratic father, Pinkham Strong, has become the alcoholic custodian of a secondhand-clothes shop in lower Manhattan...
...Sang Ok and his actress wife Choi Un Hui. Or at least that is what they told the press last week, when the pair suddenly surfaced in the U.S. Some skeptics who have followed the saga, however, openly wondered whether the tale was a little too strange even for fiction...
...made note of the fast life in the dance halls, saloons and casinos, then appended a letter home: "Still there is hope, for I know of two Bibles in town"), and finally fell into desuetude, having little more purpose in the world than grist for the mills of pulp- fiction writers. It clung on, though, a self-proclaimed "town too tough to die," until that moment in this century when the nation realized collectively there was value in old things: if there was gold in them thar Vermont barns, there was money to be made in Boothill...
Smith is less successful when he contemplates the meaning of it all. "We may be on the ground floor of the primary anxiety of the rest of history," says one character, benefiting from the hindsight of fiction. Records of the actual event contain revealing statements that defy the imagination. Said a general to the scientist who had called the century's most resonant countdown: "What a wonderful thing that you could count backward at a time like this...