Stephen Carter, the novelist and Yale law professor, “was never a neoconservative, except in the sense that some liberals really didn’t like him. His nonfiction has made him a fair number of enemies, but, he says, he didn’t mind because he could research and footnote everything. ‘With fiction I don’t have that protection. Part of what makes fiction more nerve-racking for me is that I make up the story. So what a lot of writers see as the freedom of fiction I see as the risk.'”