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"20th-Century Dreams" by Nik Cohn and Guy Peellaert
The writer-and-artist team's new bout of cultural nausea is like a tabloid that might be sold at the Whitney Museum.
By Charles Taylor
[12/09/99]

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"Fortune's Rocks" by Anita Shreve
It takes place in the late 19th century, but the sexy feminism in this novel is very late 20th century.
By Sarah Harrison Smith
[12/08/99]

Ivory Tower
Memories of an Aggie Bonfire boy
Texas A&M's annual ritual, which killed 12 this year, is not just a football rally. It's a homoerotic rite of passage.
By Dave Morris
[12/08/99]

Classics Book Group: Galway Kinnell on Emily Dickinson

By Galway Kinnell
[12/07/99]

Blackballed
A white sports fan wrestles with basketball's racial taboos.
By Sallie Tisdale
[12/07/99]

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I didn't think of the difficulty I was going have in taking these people along and then writing about them -- if I wrote the truth about what happened, about some of the key moments of this trip, I was probably going to here and there embarrass someone. One of the copilots has already written a book about the trip -- a children's book -- and said some things about me that I think could have gone unsaid. But he felt them necessary, so all right -- he has that inherent right.

I didn't want that same thing to happen to the people who traveled with me. The only way I could tell the truth about what happened between Pilotis and me -- between the copilots and me, between the two of us and the river -- was to give them the cover of anonymity. But this isn't a composite character in the usual sense. In the first page of the book it says who the copilots were. What the reader doesn't know is when those particular copilots were with me. But, no, I didn't take words that copilot No. 3 said on the Ohio River, say, then put them in the mouth of copilot No. 1, perhaps on the Hudson River. So each report was accurate for the copilot who was there at the time.

River Horse: A Voyage across America By William Least Heat-Moon Houghton Mifflin Company, 384 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Blue Highways: A Journey into America By William Least Heat-Moon Little, Brown & Company, 448 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

And, too, I decided not to give any gender to Pilotis, since one of the seven was a female. One of the reasons for that was that I thought it might be interesting to the readers -- especially, perhaps, to the women readers -- to see if they could identify when the female comes aboard and when she leaves. No one has done it yet, but then it's still a new book.

Did that create certain difficulties in the writing?

It's difficult to write a book where a character is on virtually every page of the book but you cannot refer to his or her gender. It gets rid of every his, her, she and he. You can tell I'm writing around it, but I trust the reader knows why I'm doing it.

On that note, perhaps peripherally, is there any room for fudging with the facts, whether chronological or otherwise, in travel writing?

Are we going to call it nonfiction?

Yes.

Then, according to my ethics, no -- unless the reader knows what you're doing. I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with. In "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," for instance, the reader arrives at the last page of the book to discover that some of the characters were invented by the author. I think it's all right to do that, but you have to put it on the first page of the book -- not the last.

But if you admit to nothing, like Bruce Chatwin with "In Patagonia"?

I have a real problem with that. When I learned what Chatwin had done in his books, I moved them off my nonfiction shelves into a section with other novels. It's not that they aren't fine books -- I like Chatwin's books very much -- but I don't consider them nonfiction. I think we've gotten really very loose about that. It was one of my problems, in fact, in doing what I did with Pilotis -- I knew the reader had to know, but I couldn't figure out how to set it up without a long explanation. I finally decided to give the copilots' names, and to put those names in the front of the book, and if that wasn't enough then I wouldn't worry about it.

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