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Literary Nonfiction — Walking the Line

Somewhere between the newspaper on your doorstep and the novel on your nightstand lies narrative nonfiction, literary journalism — the nonfiction novel.

Whatever label you choose, this sort of writing straddles a fascinating and fertile boundary, full of possibility and peril, as it can so easily combine the best of both worlds — an Among School Children by Tracy Kidder, The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, or pick your title by John McPhee.

It is hard to imagine a more vibrant genre, combining the immediacy of journalism and the power of true accounts with the texture, read, drama, emotional punch, point of view and broad themes of a novel ­ artistic truth melded to probing examinations and revelations about our society, culture and events of the day.

Then again, narrative nonfiction also can deliver the worst of both worlds, when the desire to construct a compelling and satisfying story trumps the responsibility to stick to the facts, no matter how inconvenient, no matter how they might detract from plot lines and character development. You might remember Joe McGinnis’s disastrous Ted Kennedy book a few years ago, The Last Brother, with its fabricated dialogues and interior thoughts of sources he never interviewed. And there have been other scandals involving the accuracy of some journalism-memoirs, such as Sleepers and The Kiss, as well as questions about the veracity of authors themselves, among them the popular historian Joseph J. Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, National Book Award recipient author of Founding Brothers and American Sphinx, who fabricated a personal past as a Vietnam war hero. Because of the heft and depth a book carries, as well as the investment of money and time they require of readers, these transgressions are, to me, more egregious even than the magazine and newspaper fabrication debacles recently come to light (epitomized by Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Stephen Glass at New Republic). Narrative nonfiction, above all else, requires the trust of the reader — which means no compromises on integrity by the author, no twisting of facts to fit the story line.

Perhaps because I came to narrative nonfiction writing from a news reporter’s perspective — I was a daily journalist for ten years, and continue to write for magazines — I tend to believe the most crucial skills necessary for this genre are the reporter’s, the information gatherer’s, rather than the writer’s. Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff is a seminal work of nonfiction not because of his beautiful prose, but because of the awe-inspiring reporting he did, the incredible detail he eked from his sources. The book reads as if he were a witness to the public and private events of the first years of the Space Race, when the reality is he reconstructed the narrative many years later. It was not his substantial gifts as a writer that brought this about — it was the exhaustive interviewing and assembly of materials. The same could be said of the rich reporting and observation that forms the bedrock of such diverse works as Ted Conover’s Newjack, an account of his time as a prison guard at Sing Sing, McGinnis’s true-crime classic, Fatal Vision, Deanne Stillman’s Twentynine Palms, the saga of murder and marines in the Mojave, and Ben MacIntyre’s overlooked but compulsively readable historical thriller/biography, The Napolean of Crime: The Life and times of Adam Worth, Master Thief.

Like a novel, narrative nonfiction imposes structure, theme and subtext to events, place and character. Unlike novelists, authors of narrative nonfiction must live with the fact that real people and real facts seldom conform very tidily to these conventions. Reality is messy, and sometimes you have to put up with unsatisfying turns to the story.

I hated the fact that Bill Leasure, the corrupt LAPD traffic cop in my second book, Murderer with a Badge, chose murder as his first crime. Only later did he segue into stealing a few million dollars worth of yachts. Chronicling events in that order would have been anticlimactic. So I abandoned any pretense of a chronological structure, and started the first chapter with Leasure aboard a stolen boat. The murders unfolded later in the book, in a section that dealt with an earlier period in Leasure’s life. Then the narrative jumped forward again to a time after the yacht thefts, when the cops finally linked those unsolved murders to Leasure. That kept the tension in the narrative building, through structurally, it was kind of messy — like my main character’s life.

Finding the right structure for No Matter How Loud I Shout, my Los Angeles juvenile court book, was even more challenging, as I was weaving together an ensemble of characters with different story lines that only occasionally intersected — a kind of literary version of “Hillstreet Blues” or “ER.” Yet these varied threads had to build toward some sort of critical mass and shared climax in order to make sense. Finding those intersection points was not a matter of clever writing. It was a matter of being there, day after day, haunting the courtrooms, the juvenile hall, the offices of the prosecutors and public defenders and judges. Our usual ears and eyes on such places — television and print journalists — only come (when they come at all) if something completely out of the ordinary occurs, something so spectacular (say, the trial of a six-year-old murderer) that it becomes “newsworthy,” even though it teaches us nothing about the normal course of business in juvenile court. Being present for the infinitely richer and more edifying moments that do not qualify as conventionally newsworthy was what counted in the end in writing Shout.

Narrative nonfiction, then, requires authors to immerse themselves in their subjects, to painstakingly (and sometimes painfully) interview characters, research place (past, present and future), and reconstruct dialogue (spoken and interior). This takes many hours, weeks and months to do. When I teach writing workshops, like the one at the University of Oregon’s excellent Literary Nonfiction graduate program, this question always comes up: How do you know when you’ve gotten enough information, enough interviews? And I never have a good answer, because I never think I have enough. I spent over 80 hours interviewing Lynne Sposito, the main character in Mississippi Mud, so that I could authoritatively write of her thoughts, actions and conversations, and I still found myself going back for more. There are no shortcuts.

This was especially true for my newest book, School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School. I spent a year at California’s top public school, Whitney High in Cerritos, where I opted to go to class every day with the kids, all day (I also taught a writing workshop after school). This might sound fairly routine (or, as the kids would say, “Why would you come here if you didn’t have to?”), but the funny thing is, journalists may write endlessly about education, but few of them actually spend any time in school. School is a place we all think we know by virtue of our own experiences, yet it is rife with surprises, hidden corners, issues you didn’t know even existed. Today’s schools, their testing obsession, the lack of involvement of some parents and the hyper-involvement of a few, and the pressures on our young people to succeed (sometimes by any means necessary) are vastly different than previous generations faced. Parents can’t go to school with their kids to see this, and students and teachers are too busy doing school to sit back and watch school with an outsider’s detachment, humor and compassion.

In an era in which our teenagers are continually portrayed as slackers and cheaters, and in which public schools are derided as failures, I found a place filled with high-achieving, dedicated students. Not rich kids in a shining new school, but a modest, mini-United Nations of a campus, with little money and but very high expectations, where kids have a love of learning, a sense of mission, and SAT scores to die for — and where families move across the world for a chance to enroll their children. But I also found a story of a generation stressed, over-tested, over-pressured and over-exhausted, for whom the admissions process has become an arms race, and obsession over grade point averages and test-taking strategies can take precedence over real learning. The temptations to cheat, to take stimulants, to give up too much in order to eke out a few extra points on the GPA were overwhelming at times.

Other kids faced different hurdles. I was there to see Angela, a gifted artist, in tears over a scholarship her parents would never let her accept because they wanted a more practical career for her. Another teen, Cecilia, told me how she fought constant battles at home over her career dreams; one of her parents finally hurled an entire portfolio, a year’s worth of work, into the street one day to be run over by passing cars. These two girls’ efforts to balance their dreams with their parents ambitions and the divergent fates they met became important threads in School of Dreams.

Persuading the principal and staff at Whitney to let me be their fly on the wall for a school year ended up being one of the most satisfying and fascinating experiences of my writing career. Becoming a daily part of that world allowed me to see that much of our conventional wisdom about what⁽s working and what’s failing in our schools is simply wrong: Many of our reforms aren’t reforming, many of our new tests are testing the wrong things, many of our leaders (and therefore most of the public) don’t (or won’t) hear painfully obvious truths.

The task of selecting the right stories and characters to emphasize out of the endless possibilities of a school year — the moments that might reveal something meaningful and human about our public schools, our kids, ourselves — was, as always, daunting. But once again, I found even the most thorny sorts of questions about structure and character development ended up being less about writing technique, and more about reporting technique. I had stacks of notebooks to wade through, but having more information did not make this task harder by presenting too many choices — it made the choices infinitely easier. When you have the goods, there is no temptation to manufacture facts or thoughts to stoke your drama and forge your narrative.

The drama is there, waiting to be found.

Here are some of my favorite works of narrative nonfiction:

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe — This definitive, biting, dramatic and revealing story of the birth of the U.S. space program puts the reader there, in every way. A penultimate work of literary journalism.

Among School Children, by Tracy Kidder — Immersion journalism at its finest, in which Kidder spends a year in an elementary school classroom in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and reveals in this small setting very large truths about teachers, students and our schools.

The Pine Barrens, by John McPhee — The master of literary journalism immerses himself in “the other New Jersey.”

Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer — The Gary Gilmore story, elevated to a modern-day Western epic. Says Joan Didion: “When I read this, I remembered that the tracks made by the wagon wheels are still visible from the air over Utah, like the footprints made on the moon. This is an absolutely astonishing book.”

Salvador, by Joan Didion — A thin book that captures the essence of the beauty and futility of a nation at war with itself.

Dispatches, by Michael Herr — This devastating account from the frontlines of Vietnam War tells you things you never knew — and some things you wish you hadn’t learned — about the war that marked a generation. This book is a timeless and — now, more than ever — timely. It should be a must-read in the post-September 11 universe.

Hiroshima, by John Hersey — This 1946 account of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima remains a classic and enduring work of literary nonfiction.