Michael Wolff is a good writer, but not a fact-finding reporter. Fire and Fury is a somewhat well written novel. He admits that he had an agenda when he started the book. That’s what novel writers do. No doubt that this book is a novel and should be categorized as such. It is entertaining gossip. But really it is based more on his interpretations of his fact-finding mission.
Compare Fire and Fury with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is one of my favorite novels. This comparison is in no way meant to demean it by comparing it to Fire and Fury.) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was about his interpretations of his life experiences as a boy hanging out with his friends. Michael Wolff took his experiences of hanging out, in and outside of the White House and made what little he thought he saw and put it into a predetermined narrative, by his own admission, trying to pass it off as fact. It’s easy to take a person’s words and “personal accounts” and change the context to suit our needs. It’s another to truly report the facts and paint a true story like a good reporter does and fact check-which most agree he did not do, including himself. Talking to your buddies, floating down the Mississippi River and painting fences gives a vivid description of what a good novelist wants their readers to experience in a story about childhood adolescence and your interpretation of your life’s experiences.
Again, under the disguise of being a reporter hanging around the White House using what little he had about other people’s thoughts, about facts that are often just speculation, he took this book, as he admits, into a predetermined narrative based on his interpretation, as an anti-President Trump writer, and took the other anti-President liars, leakers, and speculators’ comments and made a (NOVEL)…
It’s a good read, as a novel, and I recommend it. It shows how off track someone can get.
Well, you decide…fact or fiction?
