The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on April 27, 2019, 02:57:57 pm --- Seems like I would know of him better but I'm only vaguely familiar with him.
--- End quote ---
I've never read anything by him but now I'm tempted to read Hiroshima. I had no idea he was sort of the forefather of New Journalism, as they called writing by Wolfe, Mailer, Talese, Capote, Hunter Thompson, etc.
--- Quote ---Funny that it talks a lot about the notion that fiction is better than nonfiction, that we were discussing on The Renters topic. Apparently, Hersey, Tom Wolfe, and other journalist/authors had the same impression that fiction is superior. But the notion didn't hold true in practice. None of Hersey's fiction works had the same acclaim as his nonfiction.
Then, there's the notion of the nonfiction novel. In many cases, it's essential to novelize a person's story in order to breathe life into the pages. But authors can get carried away easily.
--- End quote ---
I was surprised to see Lemann repeatedly use the term "nonfiction novel." I never hear anybody use that term these days, nor do they say New Journalism except when referring to writing by Wolfe et al. But Lemann is dean emeritus at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, so he must know his terminology.
The term I hear most often is "creative nonfiction."
I think there's still some notion out there that fiction is superior. Most literary contests have competitions in fiction, poetry and nonfiction, but some only have fiction and poetry. The famed Iowa Writers Workshop does not have a nonfiction department -- you can study creative nonfiction writing at Iowa, but it's a separate program.
But I applauded Hersey's emphasis on absolute adherence to fact. That's a big controversy today among creative nonfiction writers. Most, especially people like me who came from journalism, vehemently insist on facts only. But there's a school of writers who argue that it's OK to blur the lines and if it works, it works. They call it the "lyrical essay."
A few years ago I was on a panel at AWP, the big annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. While I was there I attended a bunch of other panels and wrote a few blog posts for the paper where I work. One panel I wrote about discussed the "lyrical essay." I assumed going in was about literary style essays, but it turned out to be almost entirely about the fact-fudging thing. The session got so heated that attendees were screaming swear words across the hotel ballroom at each other.
Not the usual quiet decorum typical of those sessions.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on April 28, 2019, 10:00:13 am ---The term I hear most often is "creative nonfiction."
--- End quote ---
New one on me, and I'd be very suspicious of anything called that.
--- Quote ---But I applauded Hersey's emphasis on absolute adherence to fact. That's a big controversy today among creative nonfiction writers. Most, especially people like me who came from journalism, vehemently insist on facts only. But there's a school of writers who argue that it's OK to blur the lines and if it works, it works. They call it the "lyrical essay."
--- End quote ---
My word for it would be baloney. ;D
But with some journalism and more history in my own background, I'm with you on insisting on facts.
Jeff Wrangler:
Over lunch today, I finished Anne Boyer's article on being a breast cancer patient (April 15). Horrible. Just horrible. At work I read a lot about the treatments, but never about the side effects.
I suppose what shocked me the most is that she made it sound as if her double mastectomy was almost treated like out-patient surgery. And she was expected to return to work ten days after that major surgery? That's barbaric. And I think her point about being single and having no one to participate in her care after surgery applies to just about any serious illness and treatment. What are we supposed to do?
BTW, I know of at least one man who died of breast cancer. I knew him in college. He wrote a column (he had a rapier wit) while I was editor of the campus paper. Later he was editor for a time of the Philadelphia Gay News. IIRC, that's how I learned of his death and the cause of it. As a former editor, his death merited a short article in the paper.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on April 29, 2019, 02:11:37 pm ---New one on me, and I'd be very suspicious of anything called that.
--- End quote ---
No need to be suspicious -- it's been more or less the broadly accepted, reasonably neutral, standard term for years. It refers to nonfiction that's written with a little (or in some cases a lot) more literary flare than, say, a straight-up newspaper article or an encyclopedia entry or an article for a peer-reviewed scientific journal. I would classify many or most New Yorker articles as creative nonfiction. For one example of what distinguishes them, they often include physical descriptions of the people they talk to even if their appearances aren't essential to the story.
Here's Jeffrey Toobin's description of Michael Cohen in a piece I just saw today:
Cohen, who is fifty-two, has an unlined face, more or less permanently set in a hangdog scowl, and a voice that retains the unmistakable trace of his childhood on Long Island. In conversation, he jumps from topic to topic in a jittery staccato. To sit with him today is to listen to a fugue of self-pity and rage, from a man who also exhibits some understandable bewilderment at his plight.
Wow, most people know what he looks like and don't need to be told, but this is a perfect description of the guy, which enhances the prose. You wouldn't see that in an ordinary newspaper story. It might seem like a stretch to call Jeffrey Toobin's very factual reporting of legal affairs "creative," but at least some would qualify. They're definitely at one end of the spectrum; creative nonfiction goes all the way to kind of more avante garde stuff that even I don't like that much. My tastes fall somewhere in between. (Even many "duty" NYer articles are creative nonfiction, if they're written in a colorful, novelistic way about something you're not especially interested in but seems important enough to read.) Some people call it literary nonfiction.
Jeff Wrangler:
I read the John Hersey article (April 29) over lunch today. (Hersey was quite good-looking, wasn't he?) I've never read Hiroshima; clearly, I should. I was fascinated by the quotation on page 68 of the opening of the book. It immediately reminded me of another book, published nine years after "Hiroshima" first appeared in The New Yorker. Walter Lord used pretty much the same form in his A Night to Remember (1955), about the sinking of the Titanic, that Hersey had pioneered in The New Yorker: "It was almost 11:40 p.m. on Sunday, the 14th of April, 1912." I found Lord's use of "time stamps" and the perspectives of different people riveting. Now I guess I know where he got the idea.
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