Reality Hunger (54 page)

Conversion narrative the second: in the mid-1990s, I thought I was working on my fourth novel, but the novel collapsed—I simply could not commit the requisite resources to character
and scene and plot—and out of that emerged my first work of “nonfiction,”
Remote
. What sent me like Alice down the rabbit hole, never to emerge again on terra firma, were Renata Adler’s
Speedboat
, George W. S. Trow’s
Within the Context of No Context
, Ross McElwee’s
Sherman’s March
(shortly after I’d watched it, someone said to me that it was “the first film I’ve ever seen in which I recognized the South in which I lived”; I misheard her as saying “the
self
in which I lived”), Spalding Gray’s
Swimming to Cambodia
, Sandra Bernhard’s
Without You I’m Nothing
, Denis Leary’s
No Cure for Cancer
, Rick Reynolds’s
Only the Truth Is Funny
, Chris Rock’s
Bring the Pain
, Art Spiegelman’s
Maus
, Anne Carson’s “Essay on the Difference between Men and Women.” What is it about these works I liked and like so much? The confusion between field report and self-portrait; the confusion between fiction and nonfiction; the author-narrators’ use of themselves, as personae, as representatives of feeling states; the antilinearity; the simultaneous bypassing and stalking of artifice-making machinery; the absolute seriousness, phrased as comedy; the violent torque of their beautifully idiosyncratic voices.

Dear William,

I admire your work and was a big fan of your lecture, so the misunderstanding between us is particularly painful to me. I take these issues very seriously and am, I think, alert to nuances in this regard, as I hope my work demonstrates. Here’s my view of what happened: you mentioned your student’s interest in reading novels that deal in different ways with a narrator’s willingness or unwillingness to discuss incest or abuse. I thought of Kathryn Harrison’s
The Kiss
,
which I didn’t expect to like but which, to my surprise, I did. If you dislike the book, I’d be curious to know why, since I respect your literary acumen as it was revealed in your lecture. When I suggested
The Kiss
, you—rather cavalierly, I thought—dismissed it as beneath consideration. You said something like, “On principle, I’d never have one of my students read
that
.” To me, the implication was that you didn’t like “memoir” or that you didn’t like books that had gotten too much attention or that you’d read some of the withering reviews and had perhaps prejudged it (as I had). So I was genuinely asking you, “Have you read it?” My tone was probably a little querulous, for which I apologize, but that had nothing to do with the fact that you’re African American and everything to do with my frustration at times with the extremely traditional aesthetic that predominates at this conference. I find that the kind of work to which I’m most drawn is often condescended to here, and my snappishness had to do with that. When Melanie said, “You can’t assign
The Kiss;
it’s memoir,” I practically shouted at her, “Writing is writing. Every act of composition is a work of fiction”—an argument I’m going to try to make or at least explore in my lecture on Thursday. Let’s continue the conversation. Write me back, or let’s get together to talk.

Best,          
David         

I’m hopelessly, futilely drawn toward representations of the real, knowing full well how invented such representations are. I’m bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters. I want to
explore my own damn, doomed character. I want to cut to the absolute bone. Everything else seems like so much gimmickry.

For me, anyway, the fictional construct rarely takes you deeper into the material that you want to explore. Instead, it takes you deeper into the fictional construct, into the technology of narrative, of plot, of place, of scene, of characters. In most novels I read, the narrative completely overwhelms whatever it was the writer supposedly set out to explore in the first place.

I have a strong reality gene. I don’t have a huge pyrotechnic imagination that luxuriates in other worlds. People say, “It was so fascinating to read this novel that took place in Iceland. I just loved living inside another world for two weeks.” That doesn’t, I must say, interest me that much.

The center of the artistic process—for me—is the attempt to transform a particular feeling, insight, sorrow into a metaphor and then make that metaphor ramify so it holds everything, everything in the world.

The only way I’ve found I can live, literarily, is by carving out my own space between the interstices of fiction and non-.

I’m constantly scribbling mini-epiphanies in my notebook, but I make sure my handwriting is illegible enough that half an hour later I can’t quite decipher the crucial revelation.

The 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Elizabeth Strout for
Olive Kitteredge
. Have I read it? No. Will I? No. I come not to bury Strout (or Kitteredge) but to dispraise fiction, which has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself. I’m drawn, instead, to “confession” because I like the way the temperature in the room goes up when I say, “I did this” (even if I really didn’t). I like a documentary frame around the material for the way it promises news of the world, even though I couldn’t care less what happened and what didn’t, and I know there’s no way to mark the difference, since memory is a dream machine, a de facto fiction-making operation. I can’t write a note to my daughter’s eleventh-grade humanities teacher (Hi, Suzanne!) without little lies leaking in. Whatever can be said gets said. Language is a weird, somewhat whimsical governor. When I read fiction, I look for what’s real, try to identify the source models. When I read nonfiction, I look for problems with the facts. I recognize no difference along the truth continuum between my very autobiographical novels and my frequently fib-filled books of nonfiction. Or is this the ultimate fiction, the autobiographer slipping the bonds of actuality now that his adventures have gone public?