Because authors of fiction are writing about a world of their own invention, often in an allusive style that they have also invented (Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo), we have no right to tell them, “That’s wrong.” We can only say, “It doesn’t work for me.” Nonfiction writers get no such break. They are infinitely accountable: to the facts, to the people they interviewed, to the locale of their story and to the events that happened there. They are also accountable to their craft and all its perils of excess and disorder: losing the reader, confusing the reader, boring the reader, not keeping the
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