Hey Ellen,"I am not making this up." Dave Barry has become famous for inserting that full disclosure in his humor columns because, of course, he usually does make things up. But, as he and fellow
Miami Herald writer Carl Hiaasen tirelessly point out, real life (especially in Miami) is so bizarre, it's hard for a fiction writer to keep up these days. Lately, reality has trumped imagination.
What writer, for example, could ever come up with a novel that has a plot as bizarre as the true story of Stephen Glass? Glass, a pathological liar, was the journalist who five years ago hoodwinked
The New Republic into printing articles filled with a bunch of stuff he made up out of whole cloth, including the existence of The Church of George Herbert Walker Bush.
Oh, wait a minute; someone did come up with that novel. The author changed the name of the national magazine to The Washington Weekly, but didn't bother to change the name of the prevaricator (Glass is, after all, wonderfully laden with the symbolism of fragility and transparency). The novel, just out from Simon & Schuster, is called "The Fabulist" and it is written by ... the disgraced "New Republic" writer Stephen Glass himself. Glass has recently emerged from obscurity to promote the novel -- and to apologize for his former fabrications (but not, apparently, for his current one.)
Glass's shamelessly self-serving book ironically comes on the heels of another spectacular revelation of fabulism at work in what we thought was serious journalism: Jayson Blair's serial whoppers that went undetected for months in the
New York Times. Some have attempted to blame these latest flights of imagination on affirmative action (William Safire, in a supposed rebuttal to this attack by his fellow conservatives on diversity in the newsroom, just added fuel to the fire by opining that editors had a right to give blacks "a break," thereby perpetuating the notion that affirmative action is about hiring inferior journalists). But it is clear that making things up in journalism is a colorblind enterprise. Glass is as white as they come. And remember the very white Mike Barnicle, too.
So what is the cause of these increasingly bold journalistic forays into fabulism? I think the publishing industry is at least partly responsible. For years now, I have been alarmed at the lack of a clear line between books that present a factual account and those that offer an imaginative story. Autobiographical novels now are labeled "Novels From Memory." Nonfiction authors are allowed unprecedented leeway to crawl into the heads of their subjects and to even, as in the case of Edmund Morris's biography of Ronald Reagan, make up a character to spice up the narrative.
By allowing the blurring of fact and fiction, has the book world been sending a message to nonfiction writers that sticking to the facts is no longer required?
Hi Margo,
Well, it's a long reach from Jayson Blair to book publishing, but I'll give it a go. Searching for a connection, let's start with New Journalism and its flashy grasp of fictional techniques back in the '60s and '70s. But wait: To quote my worn paperback version of "Fame and Obscurity," by Gay Talese, this new journalism "though often reading like fiction, is not fiction. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage, although it seeks a larger truth than is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and adherence to the rigid organizational style of older forms." No room for creative flights of fancy there.
As for memoirs, the fact that respectable journalists like Rick Bragg and Jacki Lyden have written them ("All Over but the Shoutin'," "Daughter of the Queen of Sheba") makes the crossover theory tenable -- until, that is, you consider that these writers know the difference between telling their personal story and telling someone else's. In the former, Bragg and Lyden use direct quotes taken verbatim from childhood just as Mary Karr did in her bestselling memoir, "The Liars' Club" -- an obvious case of poetic license, and no editor is asking to see their notebooks. Emotional truth, not the factual kind, is what these books seek to find, and here it is the authors' lack of detachment that adds heft to their stories. Any journalist worth a byline should understand the difference between this kind of writing and accepted standards of reporting. If not, off with his or her head. No, the boom in memoirs is not a culprit in The Case of the Mr. Make-Believe Blair.
If we're looking at cause-and-effect, I nominate the shift in the balance of power between journalists and fiction writers. For the past two decades, journalists have been flashing their writerly biceps by grabbing fiction's conventions to tell the "larger truths" that Talese describes. Meanwhile, the crafters of good fiction have narrowed their view. Deconstruction theory and the decline of the omniscient narrator demonstrate a newfound humility. The novelist recognizes that his or her pursuit of objectivity and the truth are desires rather than achievable goals. But is this a good thing? Do we need journalists with egos as wide as a house, while fiction writers grovel in their garrets? Doesn't all news, all the time promote the tendency to embroider information, while devaluing the gifts of the imagination?
Hey Ellen,
It's not such a long reach from New Journalism to publishing to Jayson Blair after all. I think you've got the connections -- you just aren't connecting the dots. New Journalism originally may have intended to be as reliable as the most reliable reportage, but it also placed a dangerous emphasis on individual viewpoints. Whatever the reporter heard and saw became of utmost importance -- the context be damned. Whether we are talking about fiction or non-fiction, American letters seems to be fixated on individual egos rather than the larger landscapes of society. Perhaps it is, as you say, the loss of belief in absolute truths, but I think it's just the age-old difference between the European engaged writer (who even when he's not engaged politically is, at least, spiritually; even when he doesn't have an absolute truth, he's still searching for one) versus the American narcissist.
So we have Jonathan Safran Foer, a 22-year-old writing about a 22-year-old named Jonathan Safran Foer in "Everything is Illuminated." Dave Eggers writing about Dave Eggers in "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story.'' And Stephen Glass writing about Stephen Glass in "The Fabulist." The Me Generation has never gone away. And it doesn't matter if the writer is trying to produce fiction or nonfiction: It was all about Stephen Glass when he was writing for
The New Republic and it's still all about Stephen Glass when he writes a novel. "I loved the attention my articles gave me," he says as he urges people to pay attention to his new book.
It's not that navel-gazing is always worthless. I found both the Eggers and the Safran Foer rather engaging. I'm not against praising those that play with the truth in fiction. I'm all for imagination. But I'm worried about the message that is sent when someone can disregard the accepted premise of nonfiction so blatantly and then be rewarded with a six-figure advance for turning that transgression into fiction. There's even going to be a movie about Stephen Glass's life of lies (it's called "Shattered Glass" with Tom Cruise as executive producer). A friend of mine suggested that we might need a Son of Sam law for those who commit drive-by journalism and then profit from it later. Maybe all we need, as you say, is to value fiction more: Then the Stephen Glasses and Jayson Blairs of the world will stay out of journalism and go directly to writing novels.
comes on the heals of another spectacular revelation of fabulism...
