| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Mark C. Carnes, editor. Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other). New York: Simon and Schuster. 2001. Pp. 351. $26.00.

This book follows Past Imperfect: History according to the Movies (1995), a volume in which sixty scholars and writers contributed essays about films that purport to represent the past. Mark C. Carnes conceived of that book as a way to explore the hotly contested boundary between fact and fiction, history and art. But he found that the differences in the values and vision of those who work with words and those who work with images resulted in a "fundamental disjunction of purposes." A historian might have a good reason to watch movies with a critical eye, but the exercise did not necessarily shed new light on the nature of history or art. So Carnes turned to the history in novels, asking twenty historians to write about twenty novels, from Gore Vidal's Burr (1973) to Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods (1994). Then he asked each of the (living) novelists to respond—hence the last three words in the book's subtitle. 1

Readers who pick up the book hoping for combat will be disappointed. The historians are full of admiration, even awe. It is not simply that the novelists write so well; it is also that they know their subjects, characters, and scenes from the inside out. They have "the freedom," as John Mack Faragher says of Jane Smiley, "to imagine a past that is in some ways truer than history" (p. 147). Numerous historians identify instances in which novelists used that freedom to imagine facts, forces, and contexts years before historians managed to document them. . . .

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