Yellow: A Novel

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In his sixth novel, Lynch ( Deathly Pale ) interweaves the reminiscences of Hearst newspaperman Ambrose Bierce, lying near death in a Mexican hut in 1914, with a tale told to the journalist by a ``fellow Hearstling,'' artist Frederic Remington, in 1909. The main story concerns Remington's adventures with legendary reporter Richard Harding Davis, on assignment in Cuba before and during the Spanish-American War of 1898. The action-packed plot, which climaxes with the pair's rescue of Cuban revolutionary Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros (a historical event), is enriched by a behind-the-scenes look at the operations of the ``yellow'' press and the rivalry between the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers in New York City. Lynch does a fine job of keeping fiction and history distinct yet making them complement each other; his narrative vividly evokes the robust tenor of life in an age when America's emergence as a world power often made its press arrogant and mendacious. His strong characterizations capture the world-weariness of men who have seen the truth swamped by a great wave of misinformation. ( Dec. )

Library Journal

Ambrose Bierce, American writer and erstwhile ``yellow'' journalist, lies on his deathbed in Mexico and narrates a story of the Cuban insurrection (as once told to him by the artist Frederic Remington) to a prostitute. Only tenuously based on fact, this novel recounts how Remington and another journalist entered the strife-torn Spanish colony in 1897 and eventually liberated an imprisoned woman whom the New York Journal dubbed the ``Joan of Arc of Cuba.'' The author's creative conjecture as to how Bierce met his end after he disappeared in Mexico in 1913 is interwoven with this fictional account of how ``yellow journalism'' swayed American opinion toward war with Spain. Unlike Lynch's earlier family saga, Bad Fortune ( LJ 11/15/88), Yellow is not lacking in character development . Recommended for public libraries.-- Robert Jordan, Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City

Angus Trimnell

This story is about war, and it is about the manipulative ways in which newspapers have affected policy in the past century. The narrative is as heavy and urgent as war and the language as formalized as journalism. More than anything this is a story that transports the reader. It is based on a true story of journalist Richard Davis and artist Frederic Remington's richly appointed trip to meet resistance forces in the Cuban civil war to capture a story for William Randolph Hearst, the father of the scandal sheet. The tale is told by a dying Ambrose Bierce as he recalls for the young prostitute attending him the adventure Remington, and others, originally told him. Lynch, a journalist himself, uses formalized language, in narrative and dialogue, to build this large, engrossing world of story. Fortunately his pen is so adept and his writing so clear that this comes off not as stilted but as natural. Recommended especially for historical and political fiction collections.