REEL POLITIK

Contrary Commentary

by James Reel

Lies, Damn Lies & The MFA Novel

NOTHING IMPROVES WRITING like a well-placed lie.

All right, "lie" is too strong a term. Call it imaginative elaboration. Embellishment. Dressing the facts with one or two perfect accents that serve only to highlight the veracity of the main story. Whatever it's called, artful embellishment delivers the truth with a context, a broader canvas, a wider perspective, a larger significance.

Embellished reportage can enhance journalism as well as fiction. Unfortunately, journalists are beginning to take elaboration too far, and novelists aren't taking it far enough.

The most notorious journalist-turned-fabulist these days is Stephen Glass, who invented every detail of certain of his columns for The New Republic, a publication not heretofore known to have a fiction section. Glass is an extreme example, and so not a very interesting one; anybody who so shamelessly fabricates column fodder is bound to be found out, and few journalists care to slam up against a Glass ceiling of total unaccountability.

A far more subtle weaver of fictive non-fiction is Janet Malcolm, who spent several years in court dodging lawsuits filed by Jeffrey Masson, the Freud archivist who claimed to have been, to put it politely, misquoted by Malcolm in her 1984 book In the Freud Archives. Malcolm was ultimately judged to have overstepped the bounds of, well, good journalistic sense, and fined lavishly.

At one point in her book, for example, Malcolm has Masson saying that if he had been allowed to move into Anna Freud's house in London, "I would have made it a place of sex, women, fun," when what Masson actually said was "They're going to be calling the police on me every time I give a party or something," and "I could have had some fun."

Another widely discussed Malcolmism: quoting Masson calling himself "an intellectual gigolo" during a lunch interview in California. Pressed by Masson to come up with a tape or even notes to prove he said such a thing about himself, Malcolm dithered, and eventually conceded at least that Masson hadn't made the statement at the time and place she claimed.

Malcolm's big mistake here was not so much lying -- if indeed she did fabricate the comment; it's Masson's word against hers -- as being too exact with her alleged fabrication. The more you localize a lie, the more attention you call to the lie. A well-placed lie should remain discreet, self-effacing, serving only to place in greater relief the truth it supports.

All working journalists eventually learn in their quest to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable that the facts can sometimes get in the way of telling the truth. So, little by little, certain facts get rearranged, emphasized or downplayed, and in rare and desperate cases invented.

Usually this is a trivial matter of cleaning up an interviewee's syntax and grammar for clarity. Sometimes it means eliding a few irrelevant phrases to unite related remarks that together make a stronger point. (Traditionally this is indicated with an ellipsis or transitional narrative, but I'm seeing young journalists try to do this merely by starting a new paragraph.) Occasionally it means lifting a remark from an interview in New York and grafting it onto a remark made another time in California.

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible," Malcolm wrote in The Journalist and the Murderer, her account of how journalist Joe McGinniss misrepresented his sympathies to a convicted killer in order to produce a more honest account of the murderer's behavior. "He (the journalist) is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Media critics read Malcolm's contention and feigned righteous indignation, forgetting that this has been an open secret since at least the days of H.L. Mencken.

Without such a con game, we'd have little good journalism and hardly any readable narrative history. At some point, a compelling writer must depart, if only briefly, from the historical record. History and biography are incomplete, provisional, and so certain human truths elude the archives.

The same holds for novelists, except that a novelist's mark is not the newsmaker, but the reader.

I linger for one more paragraph with Janet Malcolm. Back in the Jan. 9, 1997 issue of the New York Review of Books, she began an appreciation of turn-of-the-century photographs by E.J. Bellocq with an account of Henry James' The Real Thing. James' novel, according to Malcolm, "has been read as a parable of representation: a lesson in the fakery required to make art, the 'lies' that are necessary to render an illusion of truth." (Malcolm's interest in such a concept could hardly be disinterested, considering her own legal problems.)

Such essential fakery has become a rare commodity in fiction over the past couple of decades, with the rise of the MFA novel. It's the literary counterpart to the Jerry Springer show. A few people -- in this case, candidates for the Master of Fine Arts degree, and their professors -- gather in a room, each setting forth a personal agenda of resentment as if reciting a grim litany of past wrongs were of compelling interest to the world at large. After each participant is viciously attacked by the others, the stories are wrenched mechanically into a form deemed palatable to the masses.

MFA programs too often draw from their students and faculties alike this sort of fiction -- earnest work exploring the troubled lives of unremarkable people (see especially the collected works of Bobbie Ann Mason). And more often than not, these generally semi-autobiographical books double as the authors' do-it-yourself psychotherapy.

I offer one example, not at all a bad book but one that bears every mark of the MFA novel and, in the abundant company of its fellows, one that seems more tiresome than it should.

Alison Moore's novel Synonym for Love initially struck me as too much a rehash of themes and situations in her earlier short story collection Small Spaces Between Emergencies. Indeed, Moore yanked out one of the Small Spaces stories, ripped it in two pieces and dropped them into the beginning and end of Synonym for Love. Nothing wrong with expanding one's material, but Moore fails to convince me that the main character in the short story segments is the same character at the center of the rest of the novel. In other words, the novel doesn't seem to grow organically from the seed.

In both volumes, characters run out of gas in a pickup in California, watch an elephant being loaded onto a ship, experience sexual abuse as minors and suffer from the absence of a father. And, aside from those plot points, the novel offers a first-person narrative, a general humorlessness and an obvious list of existential and societal grievances: Yep, Synonym for Love is an MFA novel through and through. (Remember that this doesn't mean it's student work. Moore did not write the novel in fulfillment of her degree requirements; she already taught in the University of Arizona creative writing program.)

Early on, Moore's narrator, a photographer struggling against a lens cap that's been welded over her imagination, complains, "A master's degree in photography from Berkeley has screwed up my vision, ruined my ability to compose objects in interesting ways inside a 35mm frame." An MFA will do that to you, too, if you're a writer who can't get beyond your own specific experiences as subject matter.

Only when you get past the déjà vu details and look at the novel's larger themes do you see what an interesting writer Moore could be if she'd get the hell out of the English department.

In the short story, the teenage central character is running away from home; in the novel, her adult incarnation -- Mattie -- is also trying to escape, but she is in effect running away from a vacant life toward a home that doesn't quite exist. The novel's concluding act raises one of those interesting questions that makes you glad you've persevered through a book that initially annoyed you: Mattie helps her crippled old eccentric neighbor run off.

We readers hope Mattie is helping her escape to a home more appropriate than the stifling household the old woman's family is confining her to, although Mattie may merely be turning the woman loose to wander aimlessly through the world. So does this act suggest that Mattie herself will remain on the lam from her stifled imagination and family history for the rest of her life? Or is this the vital act, the successful deliverance of a Euridice, that will finally allow Mattie to come to rest, as Orpheus could not?

Good stuff here, when Moore finally turns herself loose. But too often Moore stumbles under the MFA burden, the dead weight of dull personal experience packed up and carried into the literary world as if it had universal significance. MFA novelists have mastered little more than navel-gazing; they need to sweat more over invention. They should learn something from the more daring journalists who understand that a quote isn't true just because it's reported verbatim; it's true only when it's placed in context.

If that means a certain amount of manipulation and fabrication, so be it. For any writer concerned with telling larger truths, it's more effective to be mendacious than mundane.

Reel's Archive

Reel Politik 1: On The Future Of Reading

Reel Politik 2: How Not To Read A Book

Reel Politik 3: Plagiarists Of Experience

Reel Politik 4: Logolingus: A Private Pleasure

Reel Politik 5: A Community of Dreamers

Reel Politik 6: The Sensuous Bibliophile

Reel Politik 7: A Divine Madness

Reel Politik 8: Show Me The Books!

Reel Politik 9: The Argument

Reel Politik 10: Literacy & Community

Reel Politik 11: Real Writers Need Real Editors

Reel Politik 12: How To Read For Yourself

ReelPolitik 13: Lies, Damn Lies & The MFA Novel

James Reel is the arts and entertainment editor of
The Arizona Daily Star, a contributor to Fanfare,
and the author of The Timid Soul's Guide to Classical Music.

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