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Pulp Non-Fiction From December 1999 
You might think that we here at The Pop View would never stoop (or rise) to survey serious literature. We're all about comic books and Mike Hammer, right?
But who among us can honestly say that they had ever heard of Salman Rushdie before the fatwah? And how many copies of The Satanic Verses were actually read? The lesson is: sometimes, even the most high-minded authors turn pop. Take, for example, Edmund Morris and his biography Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Morris, in short order, managed to become a national joke. This is a goal that many Pulitzer Prize winners have managed to avoid. It's going to take another Pulitzer to save his reputation. If you somehow managed to miss the literary scandal of the year, the historian inserted a fictional narrator (a modified version of himself) into his biography of Reagan. [Click here for an article.] As a result, Morris has become the subject of much ridicule and criticism for his decision. He also provided inspiration for numerous feeble attempts to make fun of the notion of pretending you were present at historical events that took place before you were born. Here's one example. Now that the storm of clucking disapproval as died down, I would like to offer the notion that it was the execution of his conceit and not the concept itself that is the failure. Allow me to step back for a moment and look at the objectives of biographical, historical and journalistic works. When such non-fiction is aimed at the academic crowd, there is really only one goal: collect the facts. The finished works serves as a research tool for historians. But a non-fiction book aimed at the mass market must meet two goals:
When a non-fiction book accomplishes these goals and does it in a particularly vivid way, it hits the best-seller lists. Think of books like Into Thin Air, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Barbarians at the Gate, The Perfect Storm, and so on. What is their hallmark? They have all the features of a great novel. What's the compliment we pay to a gripping non-fiction work? It's a great story. Stories have a structure. There's an arc: beginning, middle, end. There's irony, foreshadowing and colorful dialogue. We want our information to be entertaining. We don't want events, we want a story. We don't want a life, we want a character. "People are starved of narrative," said Edmund Morris in a 1988 interview. "Biography appeals to the child in all of us -- that craving for 'and then, and then, and then.'" Unfortunately, reality does not always provide the proper details for a gripping story. Therein lies the problem. In recent years, non-fiction authors have been caught fudging the facts to increase the dramatic quality of their work. For example, click here to read about John Berendt "rounding the corners to make a better narrative" in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The same charges were leveled at Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm. There's an accepted tradition of bending facts in the movies (the recent Michael Mann film The Insider continues this custom), but apparently we demand more from books. I suppose it's because we consider movies to be mere entertainment. Back with In Cold Blood, Truman Capote started the movement of using literary techniques in the construction of non-fiction. And in today's competitive market, the non-fiction author is not just competing with historian Stephen Ambrose, but also Stephen King. What Do We Want From the Writer? |