Fact & Fiction: the New Journalism and the NonFiction Novel by John Hollowell (review)

Book Reviews vincing reading of the life of Savage to demonstrate Johnson's principles of biography. Samuel Johnson, Biographer is undeniable evidence that Boswell was nearly correct when he spoke of his friend as one "who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others." ROBERT C. STEENSMA, University of Utah John Hollowell, Fact & Fiction: the New Journalism and the NonFiction Novel. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. 190 p. The current critical interest in the nonfiction novel is apparently solid: Hollowell's study appeared close on the heels of Mas'ud Zavarzadeh's The mythopoeic reality & the postwar American nonfiction novel (University of Illinois Press, 1976). In part this interest reflects the production patterns in the new novel: American writers like Capote, Mailer, Wolfe have found that the narrative patterns of "real" events are as mythopeic as those of fictional metaphors. The second reason for such an interest is not explicit in either Zavarzadeh or Hollowell, whose research is essentially descriptive, with little overt use for contemporary narrative theory. Nevertheless, the issue looms large for many scholars who will consult these books; the degree to which a category like the "non-fiction novel" calls into question both the traditional generic distinctions we have inherited, and the ways in which recent work in discourse theory has addressed the question of natural vs. fictive discourse (f. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the Margins of Discourse [University of Chicago Press, 1978]). In this regard, the concern is not for the historical substance of the narrative but the strategies of narrative framing employed by the author, the role of the implied author(s), and the reading codes imposed by the two former elements. Thus a novel is not intrinsically either fictional or nonfiction, but may be "decoded" in either — or both — ways, or by a reader who accepts a certain set ofreading codes he perceives the text to evoke. Yet there is no question that an unsurprising parallel exists between varieties of contemporary fiction in the West and the concerns of current research in the theory of fiction. But future research on the nonfiction novel needs to pursue more overtly the correlation between the works, nicely detailed by Hallowell, and the corresponding parameters in narrative theory that they both illustrate and corroborate. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER, Arizona State University Richard L. Jackson, Black Writers in Latin America. Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1979. 224 p. $12.50. The shift toward an image of Latin American literature often at variance with official priorities in the various nations has led to the current interest in countercultural figures, forms of writing closer to mass culture than high culture, women authors, pre-Columbian indigenous literature, and 278VOL. 34, NO. 4 (FALL 1980) ...