SOURCE: “Sincerely Yours, Anonymous.” Christian Science Monitor (6 March 1996): 19.

In the following review, the critic explores the function of the anonymous author of Primary Colors.

First, a disclaimer: Nobody has suggested that I am Anonymous, who wrote the American best-seller Primary Colors.

For financial if not literary reasons I wish I were, but I'm not.

Having gotten that out of the way, what concerns us next is not the identity of the author of Primary Colors but the issue of anonymity itself. There is something profoundly interesting about the time we live in; the absence of a name on a book has suddenly become celebrity's spotlight, the big enchilada of political prose.

It wasn't always thus. The early works of the Bronte sisters were published anonymously; so was Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Closer to home, Democracy, Henry Adams's gloomy 1880 novel about Washington politics, also appeared anonymously. Nobody gave...