Feel like you’re living in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year or Don DeLillo’s Libra? On the back of reviewing Gordon Burns’ novel that, according to the blurb:

has taken the events from this bleak summer and turned them into an utterly unique novel about the way news is made, and how the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us

Guardian critic Mark Lawson riffs in a way that tells you just how low arts journalism can go.

The news has become a kind of super-fiction, in which one unlikely and inexplicable yarn after another – The Portugal Child, The Perugia Murder, The Deadly Teddy Bear, The Secret Donor, The Panamanian Canoeist – play out across newspaper pages.

The suggestion that journalism has become more like fiction is a pretty ancient insult but, in the past, was used to accuse reporters of fabrication. Now, though, something deeper and weirder frequently occurs in which, even when facts are accurately reported, they seem, in the proper sense of the word, fabulous. Whereas most news stories follow a grimly recognisable narrative – the sex murder, the drive-by shooting, the inflated expenses claim – recent real-life plots are dense, messy and seemingly insoluble in a way that usually requires the manipulations of a novelist.

This sense of events feeling invented is not entirely new. For several decades, writers have toyed with the idea that, whether or not truth is stranger than fiction, it is sometimes indistinguishable from it.

Norman Mailer alluded to this blurring in a 1960s phrase about “the novel as history, history as a novel,” while the French thinker Jean Baudrillard, with his theory of “hyper-reality,” argued that humans, unable to make sense of the complexities of the modern world, experienced real events as if they were fantasy. Yet such ideas – as the concept of Burn’s novel acknowledges – have now truly found their time.

The obvious temptation is to blame journalism, and it’s certainly true that these blockbuster news stories are partly shaped by the fact that today’s journalists (in print and television) have much more space and much less fear of legal censure than did their predecessors. But I think the news increasingly feels like a novel or screenplay because so many people now live like figures in fiction, defining themselves as “characters” within what artistic criticism calls a “structured narrative.”

Compare this review from the 1994 New York Times. Read it and weep.