Thomas Mallon’s “Wag the Dog,” in this week’s issue, is a
tonic affirmation of nonfiction’s fundamental principle: stick to the facts.
This principle is under assault these days by writers who proffer fictional
truth as a substitute for the real thing. For example, James Wood appears quite
comfortable with essayists who mingle fact and fiction. In his review of John
Jeremiah Sullivan’s collection Pulphead,
he praises the contemporary essay’s “sly and knowing movement between reality
and fictionality” (“Reality Effects,” The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011). Mallon admirably
dissents from this slippery approach. In “Wag the Dog,” a review of two books
about Richard Nixon – Kevin Mattson’s Just Plain Dick: Richard
Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the “Rocking, Socking” Election of 1952 and Jeffrey Frank’s Ike and Dick: Portrait
of a Strange Political Marriage – Mallon laudably upholds the distinction between fact and fiction, emphasizing that
it’s not the role of the historian to “novelize.” He says, “Mattson makes clear
from the first page of Just Plain Dick that he would really rather be writing a novel.” Regarding Frank’s
book, he writes,
Unlike Mattson, Frank does not surrender to any temptation
to novelize, even though he is a novelist, the author of a well-regarded
“Washington trilogy” that includes The Columnist (2001). Ike and Dick shows
how much life remains in artfully straightforward narrative history.
I applaud Mallon’s criticism of Mattson’s novelizing
impulse. It upholds factual writing’s core value: accuracy.
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