"Literature is just a fancy word for writing"

Philip Gourevitch (Photo by Andrew Brucker)

I applaud Philip Gourevitch’s recent post on newyorker.com in which he says “there is a kind of lingering snobbery in the literary world that wants to exclude nonfiction from the classification of literature—to suggest that somehow it lacks artistry, or imagination, or invention by comparison to fiction” ("Nonfiction Deserves A Nobel," October 9, 2014). Geoff Dyer made a similar observation in his 2001 review of Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Shadow of the Sun: “He [Kapuściński] is the victim of a received cultural prejudice that assumes fiction to be the loftiest preserve of literary and imaginative distinction” (“Ryscard Kapuściński’s African Life,” included in Dyer’s great 2011 essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition).

It’s time this prejudice was scrapped. As Gourevitch rightly says, “Every mode of expression has its formal demands. For writing that’s not fictive, that means fidelity to documentable reality; yet the best of it can only be done when the writer has an imagination as free as any novelist, playwright, or poet.” He concludes, “Literature is just a fancy word for writing.” I totally agree.

July 11 & 18, 2011 Issue

The articles in this week’s New Yorker that I most enjoyed are Nick Paumgarten’s Talk story, “Big Picture,” and Philip Gourevitch’s “Letter From Rwanda,” titled “Climbers.” The two pieces are totally different from each other in both style and content. “Big Picture” tells about a photographer’s campaign to bring back Polaroid’s old large-format, twenty-by-twenty-four-inch cameras, only five of which were ever built. It contains a funny scene in which Myrna Suárez uses one of these cameras, with its “Dr. Seussian scheme of rollers and pods,” to take Oliver Stone’s picture. Paumgarten has a gift for getting down on the page not only what people say but how they say it. My favorite sentence in “Big Picture” is “He signed the white border with a Sharpie, taking care not to smudge the goop.”

Gourevitch’s “Climbers” is about a Rwandan cycling team. Actually, it’s about a lot more than that. It explores the realities of a “hideously broken country” trying to pull itself together, a country in the grip of a paradox:

The paradox is that in the name of putting the genocide behind them Rwandans have had it held constantly in front of them, as a warning of the perils of divided identity. And for a young generation that is scarred by its historical inheritance, but free from any direct accountability, it is not enough simply to coexist and to bury the memory of the slaughter; there is a need to make the idea of being Rwandan have greater value.

“Climbers” makes this profound paradox visibly concrete – that’s its triumph. Gourevitch shows us the issues through the lens of Team Rwanda. In the course of his narrative, we are made acquainted with many fascinating details, e.g., landscape (“In northwest Rwanda, in the wet, chilly foothills of the Virunga volcanoes, the soil is black from lava, and ideal for growing potatoes”), cycling (“Gasore watched the helmeted racers whiz by, dazzling in their tight Team Rwanda jerseys and shorts – in the national colors of blue, yellow, and green – crouched over the curved handlebars of their slender road bikes, pedaling in close formation”), homes (“There was a tiny mud-floored anteroom, dark and bare except for a pair of shoes that hung, soles out, on a peg beside a bike helmet”). The images that Gourevitch presents are never static; the cycling motif keeps the narrative moving:

In the rough little villages along the road, the crowds were thick and loud, and time and again a look of ecstatic astonishment would ignite a face as someone recognized the Rwandan jersey in the lead. The air got colder as we rode past the volcanoes, and the sky got lower and darker. At midday, the light was black, and the ceiling seemed to hover almost within reach. When it began to drizzle, I thought we were passing through a cloud. Then, just as we began the long final descent to Gisenyi, a drop of three thousand feet in elevation over eighteen and a half miles, the rain crashed down.

“Climbers” is a great piece. And it’s enhanced by the title page, a ravishing Dominic Nahr photo of two Team Rwanda racers biking on a wet road past a line of smiling spectators.













Credit: The above photo is by Dominic Nahr; it appears in the July 11 & 18, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, as an illustration for Philip Gourevitch's "Climbers."

Six New Yorker Writers On The Guardian's "100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books" List

I’m pleased to see that the Guardian’s recent “The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books” (see www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/14/100-greatest-non-fiction-books) includes six works originally published in The New Yorker:

1. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (The New Yorker, September 25, October 2, 9, 16, 1965)
2. Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (The New Yorker, December 18, 1995)
3. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (The New Yorker, June 16, 23, 30, 1962)
4. Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (The New Yorker, December 8, 1975)
5. Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (The New Yorker, March 13, 20, 1989)
6. Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory (The New Yorker, January 3, March 27, June 12, July 31, September 18, 1948; January 1, April 9, December 10, 1949; February 11, April 15, June 17, 1950)

Of course, as a long-time New Yorkerphile, I can think of plenty of other New Yorker non-fiction writings worthy of “Top 100” status. For example:

Ian Frazier’s Great Plains
John Updike’s Hugging the Shore
John McPhee’s Coming into the Country
Pauline Kael’s Deeper Into Movies
John Hersey’s Hiroshima
Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould’s Secret
A. J. Liebling’s Between Meals
Roger Angell’s The Summer Game
Henry Louis Gates’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man
Anthony Bailey’s Along the Edge of the Forest
Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Whitney Balliett’s Ecstasy at the Onion
Kenneth Tynan’s Show People
The Journals of John Cheever
Calvin Trillin's American Stories
Alec Wilkinson's The Riverkeeper

And that’s just for starters. But let’s not worry about who’s not on the list. Six extraordinary New Yorker writers are there, grouped with the likes of Plato, Freud, Darwin, Gandhi, Thoreau, and Twain. It’s a tremendous honor, and is objective proof, if any is needed, of The New Yorker’s greatness. Three cheers for Bettelheim, Capote, Carson, Gourevitch, Malcolm, and Nabokov!

Credit: The above photo of Janet Malcolm is by Kevin Sturman, and appears on the jacket flap of Malcolm’s Iphigenia In Forest Hills.