SOURCE: "A Journalist in Love," in New York Times Book Review, November 23, 1980, pp. 14, 35.

In the following review of A Man, Gornik assesses the strengths and failings of Fallaci's method and style.

It becomes more and more common that a book feels like a memoir, essay or reportage but is called fiction, and at book's end one finds oneself protesting: "That's not a novel." The source of the protest is not, I think, either devotion to literary orthodoxy or a concern that a spade be called a spade. It is just that most often when journalism is called fiction, the authority of honest reportage is mysteriously lost without the command of imaginative transformation having been gained, and sometimes atrocities of language clearly related to the ambition released by the words "a novel" are committed as well. The book under review is a case in point.

Oriana Fallaci is an...