Talk:John Ehle
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[edit] What is a Novel
I'm getting tired of this. A lengthy "prose narrative" can be fiction or nonfiction. Have you ever heard the term "[auto]biographical novel"? Biographies are narratives. Or, as another example, In Cold Blood is, according to its author Truman Capote, a work of nonfiction, and it is certainly a novel. In fact, Capote claimed to have invented the nonfiction novel.
More to the point, John Ehle has also written nonfiction novels, for example, his biography of Eddie Hukov. Joseph N Hall 18:51, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
- Citing these supposed exceptions does not bolster your case. There's a reason why there are special qualifiers for these types of books: to distinguish subtypes of the main category novel. Any novel--including In Cold Blood, including A Fan's Notes, including anything else properly called a novel--contains some amount of fiction. If there's no fiction in it, then it's something else--autobiography, journalism, history, etc.--but it's not a novel. I'm not interested in a revert war, so if "fiction novel" is what you want, I'm not going to change it again--although someone else probably will, sooner or later. But the locution "fiction novel" is redundant and, from my point of view, makes the user sound like a rube. --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 20:41, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
- That was harsh and unnecessary, so let me be clearer: I do not think you are a rube. I think you are an intelligent person who has become attached to an eccentric idea--that the 99.9% percent of novels that are mostly or entirely fictional must be prefixed with fiction to distinguish them from the tiny fraction that contain very little imagined or created material. Yes, call a "nonfiction novel" or an "autobiographical novel" by those names, but please don't insist on putting "fiction" in front of of every other "novel". --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 23:42, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
- No: narrative nonfiction is a significant and extremely popular category in modern publishing. You have, for example, All the President's Men, The Right Stuff, Soul of a New Machine, The Hot Zone, Hunter S. Thompson's work (however you want to characterize it), and then any number of modern biographies and autobiographies told in the style of a novel. It's an important distinction to make in the context of an author of has written both fiction and nonfiction in a narrative style. But whatever. I'll just recast it. Joseph N Hall 05:32, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
- That was harsh and unnecessary, so let me be clearer: I do not think you are a rube. I think you are an intelligent person who has become attached to an eccentric idea--that the 99.9% percent of novels that are mostly or entirely fictional must be prefixed with fiction to distinguish them from the tiny fraction that contain very little imagined or created material. Yes, call a "nonfiction novel" or an "autobiographical novel" by those names, but please don't insist on putting "fiction" in front of of every other "novel". --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 23:42, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
