[NYTr] Karl Rove, the literary genius

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Boston Globe - Dec 10, 2007
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/12/10/karl_rove_the_literary_genius/?p1=MEWell_Pos1

Op-Ed:

Karl Rove, the literary genius

By Stephen McCauley

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.