Plausible Fiction: Jackie Was A SPY! (No, She Wasn't)

Let's track down a spooky euphemism! After all, its almost Halloween.

Page Six, again. (I know, I know, two lifts in one morning. Sorry). Aside from the blatant silliness of the book pictured above, what grabs us is the swipe from Library Journal's review calling the book "plausible fiction."

Now, Library Journal is an academic and profoundly boring publication. Which means there has probably never been an original turn-of-phrase between its covers since its inception.

So whence comes the term "plausible fiction," with its sneaky subtext of veracity and murkily mitigating modification of the perfectly clear term "fiction."

Well, this google search gives us more than 700 likely suspects. James Frey, author of the implausible fiction masquerading as memoir bestseller A Million Little Pieces, does not appear among them, though he should.

Its lots of academics, of course, who continue to muddy our post-modern waters with ever thinner slices of classification. We'll keep tracking this down, as it seems "plausible fiction" could well be the one term that captures our zeit geist gorgeously.

The war in Iraq as the start of the age of Plausible Fiction? It has a frighteningly fitting ring.