September 13, 2021 Issue

In this week’s issue, Ruth Franklin, reviewing Benjamin Labatut’s novel When We Cease to Understand the World, writes about the blurring of the line between fact and fiction. She says,

There is liberation in the vision of fiction’s capabilities that emerges here—the sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men. But there is also something questionable, even nightmarish, about it. If fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to find language for those things we know to be true? In the era of fake news, more and more people feel entitled to “make our own reality,” as Karl Rove put it. In the current American political climate, even scientific fact—the very material with which Labatut spins his web—is subject to grossly counter-rational denial. Is it responsible for a fiction writer, or a writer of history, to pay so little attention to the line between the two? [“Into the Void”]

Franklin is right to raise these questions. Does a work of fiction have any obligation to be factually accurate? The stock answer is that in the domain of fiction, artistic license prevails, anything goes, no matter how distorted it may be. But there’s another view. Christopher Ricks, in his absorbing “Literature and the Matter of Fact” (included in his 1996 collection Essays In Appreciation), argues, 

A writer’s responsibility might be put like this: you can’t both lean upon historical or other fact (this being not only permissible but indispensable to many kinds of literary achievement) and at the same time kick it away from under you. You can’t get mileage from the matter of fact and then refuse to pay the fare.

As an example of what he means, he refers to Tennyson’s worry that the figure of six hundred that he used in his “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (“Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward, / All in the Valley of Death / Rode the six hundred”) might be inaccurate. Such was his concern that he asked the editor of the paper in which the poem was to appear to put a note at the bottom citing the 607 horsemen mentioned in another newspaper. Ricks comments:

But what is admirable in Tennyson – and it fortifies the honour of this poem which honours the brave mis-commanded soldiers – is the awareness that the slope is slippery. For if we were to start messing with the actual figures, and to say that it really doesn’t matter exactly how many soldiers there were in the Charge of the Light Brigade, where would we stop? Seven hundred is all right, say; so would it be all right if in fact the British had had 50,000 men, up against a few Russian old-age pensioners armed only with pitchforks? For at some point the realities of the engagement would simply be left behind and disgraced. And Tennyson, let us remember, did not write a poem which comes before us saying, Let us imagine an act of doomed absurd military prowess; he wrote about the meaning of such an act as had just been witnessed by the world. It would have been a derogation from the Brigade’s courage to have done anything other than contemplate, with imagination, the very facts.

For at some point the realities of the engagement would simply be left behind and disgraced – that, to me, is the risk that novelists run when they mess with the facts. 

November 23, 2020 Issue

Three striking artworks in this week’s issue:

1. Sergiy Maidukov’s portrait of Grace Jones for Sarah Larson’s “Podcast Dept.”

2. Naila Ruechel’s photos for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: EMP To Go."

3. Andrea Ventura’s portrait of Paul Celan for Ruth Franklin’s “A Word, a Corpse.”

Maidukov and Ventura are established New Yorker illustrators. I’ve long admired their work. But Ruechel’s bold, color-drenched photography is new to me. I look forward to seeing more of it in the magazine. 

May 31, 2010 Issue

This week’s issue is a surreal package of good and evil. “Sunflower or a wet peony seemed the very essence of transient beauty” (from a “Goings On About Town” review of a Jocelyn Lee photography show), and “its tomato-red wallpaper printed with three hundred and fourteen leaping zebras” (from Gay Talese’s wonderful “Talk” piece “Basta”) are only seven or so pages away from “A few days earlier, six decapitated men had been left on a road just outside Apatzingan. All had large ‘Z’s carved into their torsos” (from William Finnegan’s horrific “Silver or Lead”). Right in the middle of Finnegan’s horror show, there’s David Huddle’s poem “Roanoke Pastorale,” which I found a welcome relief from all the Mexican mayhem. Huddle’s description of the heron as “wizard of stillness” is inspired! What is it with the book reviews these days? There’s hardly any extended quotation anymore. Ruth Franklin’s review of Selina Hastings’s biography of “The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham” is interesting enough. It made me want to read “Of Human Bondage” and “The Moon and Sixpence.” So, I suppose in that regard, it could be considered a successful review. But I missed being allowed to assess Maugham’s writing (and Hastings’s writing, too) for myself. I miss John Updike’s book reviews. He always served up representative passages from the books he was reviewing to enable the reader to form his own impression, to get his own taste. In fairness to Ruth Franklin, she does provide numerous snippets of Maugham’s writing, and one substantial quotation. But I guess I’m insatiable. When Franklin refers to Maugham’s “raw powers of observation” and his “singularly unemotional style,” I want samples illustrating what she means.