SOURCE: Cook, Carole. “Fiction and Mock Fact.” The Nation 224 (15 January 1977): 59–60.

In the following review of The Oranging of America, Cook denigrates Apple's prose.

If fiction and poetry, those vestiges of the mythic mind, are endangered species, it is probably because they are not considered, in a verifiable sense, “real”: not substantial enough, not serious enough, inconsequential. They, and their kind of truth, are being pre-empted by the facts, which are, as any nonfiction reader will be happy to tell you at the drop of a hat, stranger and more interesting than fiction.

But perhaps because the worm must turn, the writers of fiction have decided to invade the previously undisputed territory of fact. They're mucking around with history. The most blatant trespasser is E. L. Doctorow. Reviewers of Ragtime were somewhat unsure as to what was invented and what borrowed, and one can foresee a similar, if less...