Two "Paris Review" Interviews: Ann Beattie and Janet Malcolm

Two long-time New Yorker contributors, Ann Beattie and Janet Malcolm, are interviewed in the current issue of The Paris Review. Comparing the two interviews, I find Beattie much more interesting and open in her discussion of her “art” than I do Malcolm. In talking about her writing technique, Beattie doesn’t use the word “art”; instead, she says, “I only have a certain bag of tricks.” One of the “tricks” she mentions is bringing into the narrative “something unexpected that has a lot of immediacy.” She says, “If you write a fictional letter, the reader will perk up and think, Oh, a letter. All the rest of it’s been narrative – but this is an actual letter.” She says, “You can also do something similar with songs. Just pick a song that’s well known enough, or a musician whose sound is well known enough, and the reader will play a sound track for you.”

Reading Beattie’s interview, I was fascinated to learn how deliberate she is in trying to avoid what she calls “the temptation of tying it all together formally.” She says, “In general I end my stories before I get a chance to do something more aesthetically pleasing to me.” She’s leery of stories that are written “too carefully.” At one point, she says, “I avoided eloquence as much as possible.” At another point, she states, “In the context of a story, a fairly boring thought in a character’s head can work better than a brilliant one, and a brilliantly laid out structure can be so much worse for a story than one that is more haphazard.” In Beattie’s studious avoidance of narrative closure, and in her decided preference for the haphazard, I detect a distrust of the “well-made story” similar to the one Janet Malcolm expresses in her brilliant review of Donald P. Spence’s Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (“Six Roses ou Cirrhose?”, The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in Malcolm’s great essay collection The Purloined Clinic, 1992), in which she memorably observes, “Our lives are not like novels.”

Interestingly, Malcolm, in her Paris Review interview, doesn’t mention her wariness of narrative truth. What she does say is that,

What nonfiction writers take from novelists and short-story writers (as well as from other nonfiction writers) are the devices of narration. Made-up and true stories are narrated in the same way. There’s an art to it.

Malcolm doesn’t give examples of what she means by “devices of narration,” and the interviewer (Katie Roiphe) doesn’t ask her to provide any. I wonder if she would consider the heightening of drama (or, in Beattie’s case, the deliberate understatement of drama) as such a device. There’s a difference between writing fiction and writing nonfiction: the latter activity is subject to the ironclad rule “Don’t mess with the facts.” Malcolm’s observation that “Made-up and true stories are narrated in the same way” could be true, I suppose, so long as the aforesaid “rule” is borne in mind. But on this point, Malcolm worries me. In the interview, she quotes a passage from the afterword of her The Journalist and the Murderer, in which she says,

The “I” character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the “I” of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the “I” of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way – the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic “I” is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the dispassionate observer of life.

I find it hard to accept that the “I” in, say, Ian Frazier’s work is “almost pure invention.” On the contrary, I consider Frazier’s “I” one of the truest, most reliable narrators in reportage literature. His “I” is true and reliable because, far from setting himself up as “an embodiment of the dispassionate observer,” he is, in his writings, so subjectively, idiosyncratically human. For example, when he says in Travels In Siberia, “Aside from the rain and wind and chill, and the chronically damp clothes, I enjoyed the fish camp,” I interpret his “I” not as an “ad hoc creation,” but as Ian Frazier, the man himself, the guy I've happily accompanied (vicariously, of course) on many a great trip. The same goes for the “I” of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Susan Orlean, to name a few of my favorite New Yorker writers – writers whose voices on the page strike me as absolutely true, authentic, real, consistent. Joyce Carol Oates, in the preface to her essay collection Uncensored (2005), says,

In virtually none of my prose fiction, with the possible exception of the novel I’ll Take You There, and in that novel only intermittently, do I allow myself to speak in my “own” voice, but in my non-fiction prose, it is always my “own” voice that speaks.

Is Oates kidding herself? I don’t think so. It’s Malcolm who’s got it wrong. It’s time her viewpoint on this matter was challenged.