SOURCE: "Oriana Fallaci's Journalistic Novel: Niente e così sia," in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy, edited by Santo L. Arico, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pp. 171-82.

In the following essay, Arico examines the meeting of journalistic and novelistic techniques in Fallaci's Niente e così sia.

Although Oriana Fallaci is best known as a political interviewer, she is also recognized as an ardent practitioner of New Journalism. According to the critic James C. Murphy, this innovative approach allows the journalist's opinions, ideas, and commitments to permeate the story. Correspondents become so intensely involved that they attack their assignments with missionary zeal. Murphy refers to this subjectivity as activism in news reporting. Fallaci's effort to write Niente e così sia (Nothing and Amen), her report of the war in Vietnam, is a classic example of such activism. The personal nature of her account runs counter to more conventional journalistic...