Fabricating Lives:

...Theroux writes about the lovers of a writer of Franco-American descent who is raised in Massachusetts, becomes a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, and goes on to marry a successful British woman and find his books on the bestseller lists...

...He writes frequently on Eastern Europe...

...There, microscopic scrutiny shows things like the way Williams's ongoing homey vernacular, supposedly used to establish his innocence, can be overdone to the point that it becomes a transparent mask for his essential sophistication...

...Peter LaSalle In his recent collection of autobi-ographical essays, Self-Consciousness, John Updike admits that he had never really thought of writing a formal autobiography...

...A true master of his art who was slighted by the aristocrats of Boston when a young man, who left to study at the Beaux Arts in Paris, who returned to Chicago because in its wide-open proclaiming of American strength it seemed the place an architect should be then, and who died relatively neglected, taking on occasional assignments toward the end to design bank buildings in rural Iowa or Minnesota...

...Already the strains of Frank Sinatra's "I Did It My Way" start to work their way into the score...

...Leibowitz, a professor at the City University of New York and editor of the respected journal Parnassus: Poetry in Review, takes for his subject the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin, Louis Sullivan, Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright, and Edward Dahlberg...

...For me the two most interesting studies are not of literary figures, but of the architect Sullivan and the social worker Addams...

...NANCY BOYD is the author of Three Victorian Women Who Changed Their World (Oxford...

...Up front he announces: "The grand theme of American autobiography, almost its fixation, is the quest for distinction, a quest that has shaped and deranged American identity throughout our history...

...Maybe Benjamin Franklin-that seminal American autobiographer, as Leibowitz reminds us-should have put it all in a roman a clef...

...THOMAS SWICK is travel editor of the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla...

...JOSEPH G. DONDERS is chair of Mission and Crosscultural Studies at the Washington Theological Union...

...It is all so close to the commonly known facts of Theroux's life that the instinct here is to believe that disguised as fiction we are getting the real inside story indeed...

...JOHN B. breslin, S.J., is director of Georgetown University Press and the editor o/The Substance of Things Hoped For (Doubleday...

...JOSEPH CUNNEEN is co-editor of Cross Currents and teaches religion at Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y...

...Enter into this territory Herbert Leibowitz with an engaging new study, Fabricating Lives...

...Perhaps the overall success of this book (itself elegantly written) lies in Leibowitz's including autobiographies of literary notables (what might be expected of an English professor) and American "doers" from other fields...

...One idea that Leibowitz doesn't probe in detail but which struck me as important in thinking of all of this is how, paradoxically, the autobiography the reader might trust the most is the one that presents itself as fiction...

...REV...

...As a result he hasdelivered nothing less than a fresh reading of American history...

...What Leibowitz does is mostly rhetorical analysis, showing how the advertising for oneself works, seldom straightforwardly, to conjure up the desired image of distinction...

...she idolized her father to such a degree that she went along with his decision that she shouldn't pursue higher education (she was admitted to Smith College), and then went on to apply his lofty principles of concern in her quietly courageous caring for others at Hull House in the Chicago slums, her sole noticeable flaw an inability to give full credit to some of the others who worked with her there...

...Growing up in the Midwest she felt lonely because of a spinal deformity...

...Whereas fiction when done well elicits a willing suspension of disbelief, and whereas straight biography when done well isn't supposed to involve any disbelief to begin with, autobiography somehow gets muddled, by announcing itself as fact, but fact that invites skepticism in its presentation by somebody with more than a simple vested interest...

...But he changed his mind when he heard that a biographer was setting out to write his, Updike's, story...

...Or the story of Addams...

...He was content enough with his fiction and the way it admittedly contained a heavy serving of material from his own life...

...His most recent book, co-authored with Elizabeth Byrne, is Original Joy (Twenty-Third Publications...

...Or how Stein's atonal simplicity, which relies on understatement and repetition, becomes not entirely her life story but more a matter of a deliberate testimonial in the style itself to the ground-breaking experiments she performed with words in her fiction-fiction that often went unpublished, and when published, unread...

...These are complicated and significant lives, deserving of full psychological and sociological interpretations, and Leibowitz comes well prepared for those tasks, in their nuances, too...

...Verbal subterfuge aside, the story of Sullivan is worth re-examination...

...His fiction includes Strange Sunlight (Texas Monthly) and The Graves of Famous Writers (Missouri...

...Paul Theroux's recent novel My Secret History is a good example...

...He transports the prose, sentence by sentence, to the lab...

...THOMAS A. SHANNON is professor of religion and social ethics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass...

...Which is to say that autobiography is maybe the trickiest of genres...

...Updike wanted to give his side of the tale first...

...PETER LaSALLE teaches at the University of Texas at Austin...