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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LowtherAcademy who wrote (110154)	12/10/2007 9:19:31 AM
From: Pogeu Mahone	Respond to of 132070

Stephen McCauley Karl Rove, the literary genius Email\|Print\| Text size – + 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. 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. Maybe readers became too impatient to wade through the obfuscations of art - metaphor and simile and the mandatory epiphany. Maybe writers became impatient, too. It's a lot quicker to simply lay out the details of the abuse and addiction, and cut straight to rehab and redemption. And the bleed didn't stop at books. Television soon followed suit. Who needs another scripted sitcom when you can gather together a group of buff folks under one roof, mix some Mai Tais, and turn on the hot tub? They'll come up with their own dialogue and, if things are cooking, take off their bikinis. Fiction, on the page and on the screen, needs a carefully structured narrative; life just has to happen. More than one novelist I know has plaintively cried, "Who needs fiction? We're becoming obsolete!" But there you were with Charlie Rose proving otherwise. With a few carefully chosen words, you made it clear that fiction does have a place in American life, and that you - arguably one of the most powerful men in the world - function with a novelist's instincts. 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. I used to shudder at the sight of your silhouette as you strode down the hallways of the White House. There was always something about your man-behind-the-curtain elusiveness combined with your appearance - Baby Huey in Brooks Brothers - that I found unnerving. You've been credited with being "Bush's brain" and I was appalled with the way your administration ignored, distorted, or simply buried the facts on so many issues - from global warming to foreign policy to medical science. But now I see that you're lifting the entire genre of fiction back to the level it once enjoyed in public life. Authors are unapologetically fictionalizing their "memoirs." Reality television producers are hiring out-of-work sitcom writers to create dialogue and character quirks for the "real" people in those hot tubs. Politicians have always been notorious for manipulating statistics to their favor, but according to a story in The New York Times, Rudy Giuliani is taking a page from your book - so to speak - and just making them up. There was a lot of hand-wringing in bookish Cambridge over President Bush's gleeful scorn for academics. Who would have guessed that his administration would turn out to be so literary? From the Kafkaesque muddle of its opening chapter back in 2000 to its Orwellian skewering of language to what is turning out to be its Stephen King-like denouement. So thank you, Mr. Rove. You've taken us full circle, from "Who needs fiction?" to "Who needs the truth?" Novelists everywhere have reason to be pleased. Except maybe the unlucky scribe who gets stuck writing the sequel. Stephen McCauley, a guest columnist, is the author of five novels and teaches at Brandeis. © Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company. more stories like this