Salon.com > Joyce Carol Oates

The docu-novel

Mon, 20 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The Executioners Song by Norman Mailer

A massive, 1,000-page documentary novel of numerous voices bearing witness to the troubled life and eventual death (by firing squad, in Utah) of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore; remarkably for Mailer, a novel in uninflected American vernacular, from which the author himself seems absent.

The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy

Another massive but intellectually and stylistically rigorous novel of real-life individuals: Ludwig Wittgenstein, the most controversial philosopher of the 20th century; Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein's elder and, for a time, his mentor; and G.E. Moore, the celebrated Cambridge don. A bold and original work of fiction that imaginatively evokes a vanished world, populated by such men and women as Sigmund Freud, D.H. Lawrence, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Karl Krauss. "The World as I Found It" must be one of the most ambitious first novels ever published.

Dreamer by Charles Johnson

Succinct, slender, poetic rather than documentary in its language, this bold novel explores the private and public lives of Martin Luther King Jr. Like Johnsons fiction generally, "Dreamer" has a parable-like quality despite its historic subject.

Classics Book Group

Mon, 29 Sep 1997 19:00:00 +0000

"Jane Eyre" abounds in mysteries and surprises.

The most immediate, for Charlotte Brontk's contemporaries, was the identity of the author of this controversial bestselling first novel of 1847. So far as readers knew, the novel was by a wholly
unknown individual named "Currer Bell" -- whether male or female, no one seemed to know. Much discussion ensued in the press over the identity of "Currer Bell"; some reviewers believed the novel to be "coarse" (in its frank depiction of emotion and passion), but so intelligently conceived and written that "Currer Bell" had to be a man. ("Jane Eyre" went through several large editions before Charlotte Brontk publicly revealed herself as the author. Today, the author's sensibility seems far more feminine than masculine in its attentiveness to details of girls' and women's private domestic lives and in its wholly sympathetic portrait of a young governess virtuously resisting her employer's plea that she love him despite the fact he isn't free to marry her.)

Personal Best: Alice in Wonderland

Mon, 30 Sep 1996 08:54:00 +0000

no work of art so thrills us, or possesses the power to enter our souls deeply and perhaps even irreversibly, as the "first" of its kind. The luminous books of our childhood will remain the luminous books of our lives.

For me, it was Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass," a Christmas gift from my grandmother when I was 8 years old. First of all, I was enchanted by the book as a physical object, for there were few books in our rural household: both Alice tales were published in a single, wonderful volume (Grosset & Dunlap, 1946) with reproductions of the famous illustrations by John Tenniel, almost as fascinating to me as the tales themselves. There was a dreamlike cover showing Alice amid the comical-grotesque Carroll creations that, to an adult eye, bear a disturbing kinship with the comical-grotesque creations of Hieronymus Bosch, and this cover, too, was endlessly fascinating. In my memory, this first important book of my life was quite large, about the size of what we call today a coffee-table book, and heavy; but when I investigate -- for of course I still have the book in my 19th-century British bookcase, along with "The Hunting of the Snark," Lewis Carroll's "Bedside Book," and other Carroll titles -- I discover to my surprise that it measures only 6 1/2 by 9 inches! A quite ordinary-sized book after all.