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If you had a time machine, would you go back and kill Tom Wolfe?
The prolix culture vulture may not deserve assassination, but from the no-man's-land of contemporary fiction, Wolfe's essay, "Stalking the Billion Footed Beast," looks like a Gavrilo Princip-style smoking gun. In 1989, the man in the white suit blasted egghead metafictionists for futzing in ivory towers, instead of getting out and capturing the soul of our hogstomping nation. One anecdote related how Wolfe tried to invent a trope for straphanger angst, only to be outdone by Real Life when a walking bundle of angst named Bernie Goetz turned out to be strapped. The conclusion? Truth is stranger than fiction.
Unfortunately, fiction is more interesting. When you need a sensible story, coherent characters, a digestible Point, even the Barthian, last-gasp modernism Wolfe deplored still trumps the news. But Americans have a love-hate relationship with luxury, and reading stuff that isn't true seems frivolous. The stagnant pond of contemporary fiction hasn't bred the Dickensian epic Tom Wolfe hoped for (though the garrulous try, and try, and try); it's grown an algae of Literary Memoirs, books whose main (in most cases only) appeal is that they Really Happened.
How the mighty have fallen. Once, you were sophisticated if you read literature for craft rather than story, and understood that the fornicating Normandy housewife, the strolling Dublin ad salesman, and the group of drunks touring Spain were not Real People. If Nabokov, friend of imagination and foe of literary truth-seekers, were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave.
It's no wonder people want True Fiction (nor is it new - my 1909 edition of Lock and Key Library's Classic Mystery Stories highlights Anonymous' "Horror - A True Story"). Fiction may lose its appeal once you don't have to believe it. Recent efforts to revive storytelling - through "first-person narratives" (which may or may not be true, but for some reason are usually distasteful) and, more dangerously, through the thousand-typing-monkeys promise of interactive fiction - have been bad enough to put Robert Earl Hughes off his food. If you have to go to all this work, you deserve something Real in return.
So if readers want truth, shouldn't they be upset when the hard, gem-like flame turns out to be cubic zirconia? Apparently not. When Lorenzo Carcaterra broke wide with his child-abuse saga Sleepers, he got pounded by charges that the book couldn't be documented. But good readers (the ones who buy books) always understood that if you want the Truth you have to wait for the movie - Carcaterra's fellow inmates not only really existed - they bore strong resemblances to Brad and Bobby and the gang.
Other memoirs score higher in believability, lower in readability. James Ellroy, a novelist who makes the impossible (cliff-top battles with mad stranglers, the Kennedy assassination) seem casually vivid, bogged down in the True Crime biography My Dark Places. It's something of a cheat to learn that Ellroy actually needed a fucked-up childhood to inspire his nightmare visions - that the psycho cops and rummy assassins in LA Confidential and American Tabloid didn't spring full-grown from the author's imagination. Other talented novelists have found Truth to be a swamp. Kathryn Harrison got rich with The Kiss, but the book reads like Janet Dailey plagiarizing Humbert Humbert. Steve Erickson's "novelistic" (read "lazy") reporting on the Clinton/Dole campaigns generated American Nomad, a book of sitting-in-a-hotel-room-with-a-bong ruminations.
Just as novelists are learning not to trust their imaginations, writers of conventional nonfiction seem confused about what constitutes reality. The Times nonfiction bestseller list currently includes (alongside hard-hitting exposés by George Carlin and Paul Reiser) Thomas Stanley and William Danko's The Millionaire Next Door, disclosing the seven characteristics (or is it Habits?) of the truly rich, Michael Drosnin's The Bible Code, which proves a rabbi knew in advance about the Rabin assassination (and apparently didn't lift a finger to prevent it), and Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations With God, Book 1, which demonstrates that when insane people send mail to the Almighty, He responds.
Self-help and crypto-God literature, like the poor, are ever with us. But what about books that supposedly treat Real subjects? In recent years, the bestseller list has made room for Joe McGinnis's The Last Brother, which offered an imaginary (and unimaginative) look into the pickled mind of Senator Edward Kennedy, and Primary Colors by Anonymous (author of "Horror"), which got Beltway wannabes nattering about whether a hypothetical presidential candidate was actually a Real one. Again, good readers understood that when you get your shorts in a bind about the truthfulness of a true account, you sound like an X-Files fan bitching about a continuity snafu in last week's episode. Next summer, it will be clear that the Real President was John Travolta all along.
This conflation of fact and fiction might seem, well, dangerous, but someday we'll see it as a step in the right direction, taken while academic fuddy-duddies were still keeping it straight in their minds that George Washington was a real person but Ichabod Crane wasn't. As Churchill said of the Arthur legend, "All of it is true, or should be."
What's amazing is that memoirists are so slow to catch on. Unlike Ellroy and Harrison, most of us don't have interesting stories; our lives of desperate quietism are boring enough to need some imaginative juice. But from Peter Aison's Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie to Naomi Wolf's deadly earnest Promiscuities, memoirists keep presenting the unadorned life (unadorned by all but Exquisite Prose, that is), in books that combine the unreality of fiction with the uninterestingness of reality. Fiction's offer is more appealing: entertainment, logic, a story that does the work for you. And in contrast to nonfiction, you can believe all the details. It's like real life, only better.
So while everybody else is predicting the death of fiction (and with the caveat that I've also made hopeful bets about Home Improvement's being canceled in two weeks and the Iraqis' handing us our asses), I'm going out on a limb and predicting the death of the memoir.
Well, maybe not death so much as transfiguration. As the two sides give ground - nonfictionists trying to write novelistically, novelists trying to tell the truth - they will meet in the realm of Myth. In the future, you'll be able to choose between a fictional tale that you're supposed to take as Gospel (like maybe the Gospels) and a true one that you can believe or not (like the Roswell report). Either way, you're likely to hear a tale told by idiots.
This article appeared originally in Suck.
