David Foster Wallace: Nonfiction’s Special Contract

Our friend Richard Gilbert notes on his blog Narrative some wonderful recently published comments from the late David Foster Wallace about the difference between (and the importance of the difference between) fiction and nonfiction.

Here is one of those comments:

“[W]e all know . . . any embellishment is dangerous, that a writer’s justifying embellishment via claiming that it actually enhances the overall ‘truth’ is exceedingly dangerous, since the claim is structurally identical to all Ends Justify the Means rationalizations. Some part of nonfiction’s special contract with the reader specifically concerns means, not just ends, and also concerns the writer’s motives . . . and maybe the ultimate honesty that good nonfiction entails, and promises, is the writer’s honesty with herself.”

Michael Martone on “the fabrication business”

From Dinty W. Moore, BREVITY EDITOR:

I am a staunch fan of Michael Martone — love his writing, love the way that he pushes the envelope for all of us.  At the same time, I still think that genre — is this fiction or nonfiction — does matter, and I sink dejectedly into my seat every time Martone (pictured on the right, at a recent AWP Conference) suggests it does not.  So he makes me uncomfortable, which, since we are in the business of making art, is actually a decidedly good thing.

So to keep the discomfort going, here’s an excerpt from a fascinating interview with Martone, wherein he makes some strong points suggesting that genre-conservatives like myself are all wrong-headed about this insistence on the ‘truth’ distinction:

“I want to think of what I do as writing and let the speciation to others. Many artists draw, use watercolor, paint in oils, sculpt, construct, assemble, paste. They mix their media but it is all seen as art, and issues of its fact or fiction seem beside the point to me. Well at least beside the point when the thing is in the making. I am in the fabrication business and there are different gradients on that scale of fiction and non-, I suppose, but none I worry about as I am doing them. I have a fiction in the voice of Dan Quayle who is writing an essay; a book about Michael Martone written by Michael Martone in the voice and form of his, Michael Martone’s, biographer; I have an essay in the voice of Michael Martone on the fictional creation of a character named Bobby Knight. To me the differences are in the details at a microscopic scale, not at the much larger one of genre.”

Read the rest of the interesting interview over at THE QUARTERLY CONVERSATION.

James Frey’s Obituary

Steve Almond, writing a tongue-in cheek-obituary, in the VQR’s Writers on Writers edition. Frey deserves this, and it is hilarious:

In 2028, Frey’s eldest son, Malcolm X Frey, published a searing memoir that detailed his life “as the son of America’s most notorious liar.” The younger Frey portrayed his father as a laxative-popping sexual predator who routinely made his children watch him do squats and who ate entire roasted turkeys in one sitting. Freyed at the Edges was an instant bestseller.

His other children and two of his ex-wives condemned the account. Frey himself filed a defamation suit seeking to halt publication. The case was settled out of court after his son agreed to include a disclaimer in future editions, noting that portions of the book were fictionalized.

Writing in Vanity Fair, journalist Christopher Hitchens accused the entire Frey clan of staging “an elaborate and deeply cynical publicity stunt.” A suit against Hitchens was filed and later dropped.

Read THE WHOLE OBIT