Are novelists entitled to use real-life characters?

Tolstoy musing on (or through) General Kutuzov, or Dumas making a (splendid) villain of Richelieu, or even Shakespeare’s Tudor propaganda.

Virginia Woolf walking through her suicide and the writing of Mrs Dalloway in Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours”. Don Delillo used Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra and Jackie Gleason, J Edgar Hoover, and Frank Sinatra as characters in “Underworld”.

Here’s the New York Times on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, “Blonde”. ‘If a novel can’t deliver Marilyn Monroe’s beauty … it can give us her interior world.’ (What has happened when a reviewer suggests that a novel gives us the true inner world of a real person? The illusion of an illusion?)

Robert Harris’ entire oeuvre (”Fatherland”, “Pompeii”, etc.) consists of fictionalized accounts and alternative histories.

Steve Martin’s excellent play, “Picasso At The Lapin Agile”, features fictionalized versions of Picasso, Einsten and Elvis.

In “Loving Frank” Nancy Horan So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney’s diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright.

In “The Women” T.C Boyle takes Frank Lloyd Wright a step further (four steps further?) when he moves the narrative backwards in time through the accounts of four women in Wrights life: Olgivanna, the steely, grounded dancer from Montenegro; Miriam, the drug-addled narcissist from the South; Kitty, the devoted first wife; and Mamah, the beloved and murdered soul mate and intellectual companion who kept a diary.

T.C. Boyle had already been down the true fiction road with “The Road to Welville” and his account of the making – and somewhat undoing – of John Kellogg of Kellogg’s breakfast cereal fame.

Zachary Lazar reimagines the 60s in “Sway” with such characters as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charles Manson and Kenneth Anger.

Even Norman Mailer has a go with his childhood Hitler in the “The Castle in the Forrest”.

How can it be an ethical problem. A fictionalized account may well have more ‘truth’ than even an autobiographical account. It’s subjective and, when it’s fiction, people should understand it’s fiction, and not judge by so-called ethical or truth-based criteria.

So long as such works are clearly classified as “fiction”, where’s the harm?

How can a made-up story invade anyone’s privacy?