SOURCE: "Airheart," in New Republic, Vol. 214, No. 25, June 17, 1996, pp. 38-41.

[In the following review, Spufford discusses how Mendelsohn fuses the individual and the legend of Amelia Earhart in I Was Amelia Earhart.]

To a novelist, the real people of the past are coalesced masses of characteristics learnable from the work of biographers or historians; inert, yet available to be woken. But animating a celebrity, and a comparatively recent celebrity, is inevitably a double process. You enter not only the person, but also the envelope of their fame; their mind, and then their persona, a thing determined very variously in collaboration with the world, concerted between the actual body of the person and the bank of night-blooming camera flashes which greeted them at train stations. You find that you need to make some judgments—some discriminations—that aren't purely a matter of the assessment of past character. These are...