Why Fiction?

When did reality start to outstrip fiction for good? Philip Roth believed it was all happening around 1961. “The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality,” Roth wrote in Commentary, when he was not yet thirty years old. “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.” Gazing back more than sixty years, we can find some of this lament quaint. Roth cited Charles Van Doren, who cheated on the quiz show Twenty-One, as one of his imagination-shattering tribunes, along with Dwight Eisenhower, embodiment of the staid postwar consensus. (Roth was prescient, at least, about tossing Roy Cohn into the mix.