Although there's always the chance of a monstrous success like that of Jewel, it's far more likely that publishers look to celebrity literature sales over the long haul.  "More often editors are thinking [that] in paperback they'll pay off," according to Sara Nelson, executive books editor for Inside.com.   That's the case with Hawke, whose first novel still manages to sell a couple of thousand copies each year in Vintage paperback

Still, loyal stage-and-screen fans are no guarantee for literary success.  One of the biggest literary bombs of this year is A Mother's Love, a young-adult novel co-authored by teen pop star Britney Spears and her mother, Lynne.  Published by Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Books for Young Readers, the book "did not do as well as they hoped," according to Inside's Nelson.   "They published it as a mother-daughter thing to coincide with Mother's Day.   It didn't pay off."  To date, the novel has sold fewer than 100,000 copies, a major disappointment, considering the $1.25 million advance Spears received.   While some literary wags insist that the reason for the book's failure is that Spears neglected to promote it as aggressively as she might have, others feel the book is simply a dud.

But shed no tears for this teen hearthrob.  While Spears may have been stingey with her book-promoting efforts, she's still giving her all to promoting Pepsi.  The results?  The performer's contract with that company is rumored to stand at $94 million, paid out over five years.  Enough said.

Stranger than Fiction?

A Toronto-based Liberal candidate for office, Bob Hunter, insists it's not true.   Hunter recently found himself on the political firing line for a book he wrote 13 years ago.  In it, the narrator of the story partook of "tourist sex" with children in Thailand. 

Hunter, angry at being smeared as a pervert and a pedophile, described his book variously as fiction, parody, satire, and fantasy.  It was absolutely not non-fiction, he insisted.  But others weren't so sure, since On the Sky (which is now out of print) was marketed as autobiography by publisher McClelland and Stewart.   The book's dustjacket went so far as to proclaim, "It's All True!"  As Robert Fulford pointed out in a recent column, when the book was first published, it was widely received as an example of fast-and-loose "gonzo" journalism.  The review in the Globe and Mail accepted the tome as true, and the University of Toronto library categorized it under "Adventure" rather than "Fiction."

Defenders of Hunter have made the obvious point that it is wrong to confuse an author's own beliefs and opinions with a point of view held by a character in a book.   Novelist Barbara Gowdy sees the controversy as an attack on free speech, and has gone so far as to demand an apology from Hunter's critics "on behalf of all imaginative thinkers, let alone fiction writers." "You are not your characters," Gowdy said.  "Any child can tell you A. A. Milne is not Winnie the Pooh."

That may be true.  But equally true is the fact that the "historical novel" and gonzo journalism have blurred the distinction between fact and fiction, and a controversy like the Hunter affair illustrates the difficulty in keeping them apart.   While critics such as Oscar Wilde once complained about the "decay of lying," modern readers have come to expect a certain degree of truth in their fiction.  It's no longer enough for a writer to talk the talk.  A truly great writer (a Fitzgerald or a Hemingway, for example) is also expected to walk the walk.   As a result, many critics and reviewers today are burdened by a nearly obsessive desire to connect the dots between an author's work and his or her biography (remember the furor in response to Salman Rushdie's Fury?).

Yet, literature, as T. S. Eliot once remarked, involves the extinction of personality so that the fiction may live.  Unfortunately, we exist at a time when personality is nearly all that most popular authors possess.  Many of our most celebrated authors are now writing historical novels whose greatest claim to genius is their appearance of being "well researched."  Whatever happened to outright making things up, once the sole staple of literary fiction?

Hunter, who ended up losing his election, seems to have failed to understand the importance of being earnest in a pair of professions, literature and politics, whose coin is deception.  In the end, what is necessary to succeed in either field is not sincerity but the ability to create the illusion of sincerity.  The worst thing that can happen is to get caught on the fence.

Remembering Your Roots

Joyce Carol Oates says she writes all the time, and it must be true, considering her prodigious output.  But her literary success hasn't gone to her head.  She recalls how and where she started.  She still sends short stories into The Prairie Schooner, a literary magazine at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, one of the first publications to publish her work