Stephen McCauley: Karl Rove, the literary genius

[Eugene]

Source: Boston Globe

Stephen McCauley

Karl Rove, the literary genius

By Stephen McCauley
December 10, 2007

DEAR MR. ROVE:

I'm guessing you don't receive a lot of complimentary
messages from my ZIP code, but this is a thank you note.
To be honest, I'm surprised to find myself writing it -
I haven't been a fan. But after watching your recent
performance on "The Charlie Rose Show," I felt I had to
express my gratitude.

When I saw you implying that the Bush administration was,
in essence, pressured by the Senate to go to war in Iraq
before it wanted - before letting weapons inspections
run their course, before forging a true international
coalition - I realized that you're something of an ally.

I don't mean a political ally.

Here's the thing: I earn the bulk of my living writing
novels - made-up stories about invented people - and
somewhere in the middle of your bold restructuring of
the historical record, I understood that you are, and
always have been, a fiction writer's good friend.

-snip-

When faced with a question that challenged the logic
of your worldview, you did what novelists do: You made
something up. You twisted the record to fit your
narrative with the subtlety of Austen and the boldness
of Tolstoy. And you did it with such Fitzgerald-like
conviction, a lot of viewers probably accepted it, like
they accept Gatsby's infatuation with Daisy.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/12/10/karl_rove_the_literary_genius

[Jim__]

1. I agree with his sentiment.

However, I disagree a little with this paragraph:

Literary fiction hasn't been flourishing in this country for the past decade. It used to be that people went to novels for great stories and memorable characters. For years, they read Jane Austen's romantic comedies and Leo Tolstoy's sprawling sagas and F. Scott Fitzgerald's melancholy love stories to connect, on a profound level, with the complicated ambiguities of emotion. Then, back in the mid-1990s, our culture took a sharp turn, and suddenly, everything was about "truth." Writers and readers abandoned the novel en masse, and shifted their allegiance to the memoir.

If it's "truth" people want, good fiction is one place to find it.