There is one dark art, however, that nonfiction cannot fully replicate: the ability of immersive narrative literature, and especially fiction, to blur, or even eradicate, the boundary between reader and subject. Readers of a history are reminded on every page, with every footnote and dutiful scholarly reference and contextual aside, of one’s distance from the action. The reader even of a memoir or a diary can never fully suspend disbelief, since the dramatic stakes of the narrative rely on its authenticity—on the assertion that the events described really happened and that the people depicted really experienced them.
Novelists don’t tend to bother about that. A novel’s success depends not on its faithfulness to reality but on the author’s ability to beguile the reader into empathizing with its hero and, for a brief time, exchanging the reality of the world for the reality of the novel. (“Writing Under Fire,” The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2023)
I strongly disagree. I’m currently reading Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), an account of his two-thousand-mile journey down the Mississippi River, piloting a sixteen-foot aluminum motorboat, and I couldn’t be more immersed. I’m right there with him as he tries to navigate sloughs, chutes, towboats, stumps, eddies, boils, locks, and wing dams. It’s one of the most immersive books I’ve ever read. Same goes for his Passage to Juneau (1999) and Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia (2010) and Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969). There’s no boundary between me and the worlds described in them. I’m there. These events really happened. No suspension of disbelief is necessary. Just sink in and experience them – that's the promise these great books gloriously fulfill. Rich underestimates the power of factual writing.
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