Novel Non-Fiction  Alexander Zevin, English 156 (Victorians and
Moderns), Brown University, Spring 2004  If Heroes and Hero
Worship, by that "Victorian Gent" Thomas Carlyle, is a piece of
fiction posing as non-fiction, Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is
just the opposite: non-fiction dressed as a novel, omnipresent
narrative hedged in by newspaper columns. Both Carlyle and Wolfe
are straddling genres. Carlyle, as an eminent practitioner of
Ars Oratoria, gives lectures that reject science, that omit, in
many cases, historical evidence (see Odin and Johnson), in favor
of a romantic rubric of meritorious rises, of Horatio Algers,
Carlyle among them, waiting to reap the rewards of their ascent.
Wolfe, novelist, new journalist, fedora-wearing dandy, had yet
to complete a "traditional novel" when The Right Stuff was
published in 1979; in it he clasps that "old genre" in a fatal
embrace as he consciously effaces the boundaries between
journalism -- its third person objectivity -- and the novel's
tropes and narrative str