Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other)

As he did in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, Barnard College professor Carnes rounds up a group of historians to comment on the uses made of their craft by creative artists. Since novelists generally stick closer to the facts than filmmakers, the tone here is more respectful (and, unfortunately, somewhat less entertaining) than in the previous book. We read a few too many times that historians are ""quite willing to recognize--and to learn from--the novelist's license to reconstruct the past in the interests of a reality deeper than literal truth,"" as James M. McPherson puts it in his essay on Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks, and almost all the living novelists who responded (Annie Dillard and Barbara Kingsolver did not) offer some variant of Aztec author Gary Jennings's defense penned before his death in 1999: ""Shit, I was writing a novel, not a Ph.D. thesis."" Still, many gems here illuminate the complex interaction between art and reality, including Banks's remarks on the ""precision and eloquence"" of 19th-century speech that gave him his narrative voice and Carnes's comments on the new social history's neglect of individual experience, which left a gap to be filled by novelists like William Kennedy in Quinn's Book. Other standouts are H. Bruce Franklin's pointed comments on how Tim O'Brien challenges willed historical amnesia about Vietnam with In the Lake of the Woods and John Demos's passionate, very personal appreciation of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. By contrast, Eugene Genovese and Dianne Kunz irritatingly refight the culture wars and the Cold War in their respective pieces on William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner and Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. The quality varies with the individual authors, but both history buffs and aficionados of literary criticism will find food for thought here. (Mar.)