Ay de mi!

Due to a technical disaster at Hinterlands Central, I may be a little bit preoccupied for a day or two. 

Meanwhile, I bring you the latest from the Fiction vs. Nonfiction Smackdown, also known as the Debate that Will Not Die, this from Jay McInerney writing in The Guardian.  (Full disclosure moment, should anyone care, though the point is entirely irrelevant: JM and I share a collegiate alma mater.)

You may recall an earlier round of the Smackdown, V.S. Naipaul in a New York Times interview:

"What is more, Naipaul said, only nonfiction could capture the complexities of today's world," notes the article, before turning to Naipaul himself, who opines, "What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material.  And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.''

It appears JM didn't think much of all this.  Writes JM in his piece in the Guardian: 

First, a disclaimer: the following is a work of non-fiction. As such, it is unlikely to be as vivid, or textured, or as faithful to the author's deepest convictions and emotions as his own fiction, as linguistically adventurous or as revealing about the way it feels to live now as the latest novels by Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith. I write novels. In fact, I just finished one, which is one reason I was alarmed to hear VS Naipaul declaring recently, in an interview with the New York Times, that the novel was dead.

OK, I'm hazarding a guess here on which team JM will be siding with in the smackdown.

Continues JM:

The fact is that we are waiting for our major novelists to weigh in and make sense of the world for us after the events of September 11 2001 and July 7 2005. It is to the novel, ultimately, that we turn to confirm our own senses and emotions, to create narratives that reveal to us how we feel now and how we live now, to reveal emotional truths that approach the condition of music. We desperately want to have a novelist such as McEwan or DeLillo or Roth process the experience for us.

Are we indeed "waiting for our major novelists to weigh in...."?    Do we in fact "want to have a novelist...process the experience for us"?  And why,I keep asking, must the one--fiction--be pitted against the other--nonfiction--in some struggle to be named the better of the two?  Isn't there room for both in the world?  And jeez, whatever happened to reading a good book for the sheer pleasure of it?

And so I pose the question: why do you read? 

Comments

[The Happy Booker]

why do I read? Heh. Maybe it's like the old Picasso line: "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth." But then where does that leave the non-fiction faction?

Can't we all just get along-- xxoo, THB

[t]

Ay chihuahua. What stopped me was the phrase "waiting for our major novelists to weigh in ...." When I taught literature, one thing I always said was that great literature is a mirror -- we see ourselves, usually as echoes but sometimes even pretty directly. But waiting for the Greats to tell us how we feel? Seems plenty of writers -- journalists, creative nonfiction types or no -- are articulating plenty. "...emotional truths that approach the condition of music." Yeah, Mac, wrassle the 9-11 experience into a fugue (dirge? flamenco?) in order to make it authentic. If you can remember for that long how it made you feel ... or what your child said to you that afternoon.
Do I sound a little annoyed?
C, glad you found a box to write on.

[Erin]

I just received my copy of Julie and Julia and was surprised to see in the Author's Note, just after she says she disguised certain people and events for discretion's sake (which is fine), she says "Also, sometimes I just made stuff up."
I was just curious what you thought of this.

[patty]

Someone once said -- it might've been Richard McCann when I studied w/ him in Provincetown, but I'm not certain -- that some of us tell the truth better when we're wearing a mask while others of us don't need one. Now, I'm afraid I'm even paraphrasing badly, but in any case, I think we're all after the same thing -- a good story, some version of "the truth."

[Bill]

I'm also intrigued by this notion we need someone to tell us how we feel about those events. When the memories remain so fresh, do we need someone to do this? Four years later, I still don't feel as if that day has ended. How can we look back on what happened when we're still caught in it?

I usually read to escape. Perhaps that biases my opinion on books about 9/11.