These writers are engaged in a sophisticated project, in which the line between truth and fiction becomes harder and harder to make out. A fiction can never be accused of being a lie. This is the flip side of “reality hunger,” since a lie, like a fake memoir, is a fiction that does not admit its fictionality. People who can turn a lie into a truth have the power to shape reality; they are poets of the real. From its beginning, the novel has tested the distinction between truth, fiction and lie; now the collapse of those distinctions has given us the age of Trump.

Source: New York Times January 15, 2017 19:26 UTC