February 4, 2013 Issue

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. 

October 1, 2012 Issue

In this week’s issue, three Talk story masters – Nick Paumgarten, Ian Frazier, and Alec Wilkinson - strut their stuff. Paumgarten’s intriguing “Hello, Bobby” is about record producer, Scott Litt, and his experience as recording engineer on Bob Dylan’s latest album “Tempest.” There’s a very funny line in it. It’s Litt quoting Dylan, and it goes, “He just went, ‘Heh heh heh. “Hello, Dolly.” ’ ” That’s a very improbable, surrealistic line, and I can hear Dylan saying it. It’s a tribute to Paumgarten’s ear (listening to Litt tell the story) that he’s able to capture it.

Frazier’s “Neighbors” is a rarity – a Talk story with a line break. That’s because, for a Talk story, it’s longer than usual; it’s actually two stories in one. The first part tells the story of Brooklyn folk artist Evelyn Talarico. The second section is about L. B. Brown, owner of Clinton Hill Simply Art and Framing Gallery, in Brooklyn. The two sections are linked by Talarico’s statement, “Six years ago, I went to the neighborhood gallery, and the owner, Mrs. L. B. Brown, she told me, ‘You are a folk artist, a self-taught outsider artist.’” Frazier visits Brown in her gallery. She turns out to be – like so many of Frazier’s city dwellers – an arresting, admirable individual, full of interesting talk about her “little business.” For example, she says:

“Everybody wants their cherishables framed. And to do this right I’ve got to be like a fortune-teller. I have to take time with you to get a sense of what works in your dining room or your man cave. Are you a wood person or a chrome person? Do you want to go all the way up to museum glass to conserve whatever it is you want in that frame? This is the type of question I ask.”

Mitchell, Liebling, and Singer would appreciate that quote. And so do I. I can almost see Frazier smiling inwardly as he copied it down.

Wilkinson’s “Indigenous” is a little different from Paumgarten’s and Frazier’s pieces. Except for its brilliant last line, it doesn’t contain much direct quotation. What it does have is fabulous descriptions of Mexican herbs and vegetables. “Indigenous” is a mini-profile of Gudelio García, “one of the only farmers in New York City raising crops that are native to central Mexico.” He farms an acre plot, called El Poblano Farm, on Staten Island. Paumgarten describes some of Garcia’s crops as follows:

García grows papalo; pepicha; flor de calabaza, or squash blossoms; quelites; jicama; chayote; epazote, a spicy herb that smells like gasoline; ejote; and three kinds of Mexican peppers – jalapeño, serano, and poblano. Papalo and pepicha are similar tasting herbs. They are used fresh, mainly in soups and tacos. Flor de calabaza is a yellow-orange flower used in quesadillas. Quelites are edible greens, and jicama is a root, something like turnip. Chayote is a pear-shaped squash, epazote is an herb often cooked with beans, and ejote is a string bean.

There’s poetry in that list! It reminds me of the amazing sequence of weeds and wildflowers set out in Joseph Mitchell’s classic “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956). And I think Paumgarten’s, Frazier’s and Wilkinson’s pieces are destined to become classics, too. They’re certainly among this year’s most enjoyable Talk stories.

Postscript: I suppose I’m going to sound like a Puritan if I ask why there seems to be such reluctance to disapprove of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s slippery practice of mixing fact and fiction. I don’t think of myself as a Puritan. But I do rigidly hold to one fundamental journalistic principle: facts are not to be messed with. The “Briefly Noted” review of Artur Domoslawski’s biography Ryszard Kapuscinski, in this week’s New Yorker, coolly and neutrally observes that Domoslawski “praises Kapuscinski’s work as ‘non-fiction which does not hold fiction in contempt.'” Praises? The use of fiction in a piece that represents itself as fact hardly warrants praise. Quite the opposite – it should be deplored! I’m surprised the “Briefly Noted” reviewer withheld comment. I’m wondering if James Wood wrote it. He appears quite comfortable with essayists who mingle fact and fiction. In his review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s great essay collection, Pulphead, he praises the contemporary essay for a “sly and knowing movement between reality and fictionality” (“Reality Effects," The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011).

Another reviewer who suspends judgment in respect of Kapuscinski’s blurred line between fact and fiction is Neal Ascherson. In his review of Domoslawski’s book on Kapuscinski, Ascherson says that Kapuscinski “habitually exaggerated, often changing details for effect” (“How It Felt To Be There,” London Review of Books, August 2, 2012). This would seem to be about as damning a charge against a journalist as there could possibly be. Yet, Ascherson appears willing to give Kapuscinski the benefit of the doubt. He admits “there’s no doubt that Kapuscinski – writing for publications and readers who had no way to check what he told them – overstepped them in the sense of selling ‘faction’ as fact.” But after rereading Kapuscinski’s Another Day of Life, a chronicle of the war in Angola, Ascherson softens, concluding, “He probably did embroider and reposition details about the fighting in Angola. But, as a reporter on one of those wars, I can say that he caught ‘how it felt to be there’ as nobody else could.”

This whole business of journalists fiddling with facts came up a few months ago when John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact appeared. Reviewing that book in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jennifer B. McDonald, called D’Agata’s championing of belief over fact “hogwash” (“In the Details,” February 26, 2012). I totally agree. I say the same thing about "non-fiction which does not hold fiction in contempt.”

December 19 & 26, 2011 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It’s the last issue of the year, and it’s terrific. It contains at least a half-dozen excellent pieces. The two that I’ll comment on here are Burkhard Bilger’s “The Great Oasis” and James Wood’s “Reality Effects.” Bilger consistently produces some of the magazine’s best writing. His “Towheads” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010) was one of my “Best of 2010” picks (see my December 28, 2010, post). This year, his “The Possibilian” (The New Yorker, April 25, 2011) and his “True Grits” (The New Yorker, October 31, 2011) were both tremendously interesting and enjoyable. Now we have his brilliant “The Great Oasis.” It’s about reforestation in desert lands. Among its highlights are: (1) a visit to Oman where a Dutch inventor, named Pieter Hoff, is testing an experimental tree-planting device called the Waterboxx; (2) a description of the Great Green Wall, a massive project in which “eleven African nations have agreed to erect a wall of trees across the dusty shoulders of the continent” for the purpose of halting the spread of the Sahara; (3) a trip to Burkino Faso to meet Chris Reij, an agroforestry specialist, and learn about the African Re-Greening Initiative, in which farmers are reforesting vast stretches of the Sahel; and (4) a search for “one of the last baobabs in northern Oman.” The piece is beautifully structured, beginning and ending with the search for the baobab tree. And it is artfully written. Bilger gives us interesting facts in words we can picture. Here is rainfall in the Al Hajar Mountains of northern Oman: “When the clouds burst, as they do a few times a year, the rain skitters from the slopes like oil from a griddle, gathers into rivulets and swiftly moving sheets, and tumbles into wadies that wind between the peaks.” Here is the baobab tree that Pieter Hoff was searching for: “In the deepening dusk, it looked like an apparition out of ‘The Arabian Nights’ – a fat caliph surrounded by his fan-fluttering harem.” And here’s the sound of two men praying: “Their voices came to us as a steady murmur mixed with the rustling of the leaves.” The Sahara (“the only traces of green are a few umbrella-thorn trees, Acacia tortilis, anchored to the bare rock”) and the Sahel (“the grasses were parched brittle and sere, the red soil baked hard beneath them”) are evoked with a specificity that puts us squarely there. Bilger’s details are wonderful (e.g., “The only signs of life were a few Senegalese fire finches, darting like sparks among the shea trees”). “The Great Oasis” is a marvelous piece. I enjoyed it immensely.

I kept thinking of Bilger’s writing as I read James Wood’s “Reality Effects.” What does Wood think of Bilger’s work? Does he even read it? To be frank, until I read “Reality Effects,” in this week’s issue, I suspected that Wood was blind to the merits of literary journalism. For example, in “Keeping It Real” (The New Yorker, March 15, 2010), Wood calls David Shields’ promotion of “reality” over fiction “highly problematic.” In reply to Shields’ preference for essays and memoirs rather than fiction, Wood advanced the example of Tolstoy, who, he says, “so often reproduced reality directly from life.” Wood calls Tolstoy “the great ‘reality-artist.’” I share Shields’ skepticism regarding fiction, even fiction as consummate as Tolstoy’s, as a representation of reality. Fiction is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie. I much prefer factual writing. Now, in “Reality Effects,” an admiring review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay collection Pulphead, it appears Wood is starting to see the light. He says of Sullivan’s pieces:

It is obvious enough that they are by a talented storyteller, who has learned from fiction (as well as from the essayistic tradition) on how to structure and ration his narratives. He seems to have in abundance the storyteller’s gifts: he is a fierce noticer, is undauntedly curious, is porous to gossip, and has a memory of childlike tenacity. Anecdotes fly off the wheels of his larger narratives.

The verve of that last sentence is thrilling. It would appear that what Sullivan writes falls more into the category of “personal history” than it does “fact piece.” (Last night, I dipped into Pulphead for the first time; its “Mr. Lytle: An Essay” is excellent.) This is why Wood says Sullivan’s talent “is beautifully for the real” and why he immediately qualifies this observation with “or, rather, for the real fictions that people make of the real, and which they live by.” Bilger’s art is “beautifully for the real,” too. But it doesn’t move between reality and fictionality the way Wood says the contemporary essay often does. Bilger’s writing is factual. That’s what I like about it. “Factual” is a word Wood seldom, if ever, uses. Maybe someday he’ll see its value. I find it promising that, in “Reality Effects,” he’s at least showing appreciation for something other than fiction.