McFiction

Years ago, when McDonald's was still a recent addition to the world of dining out, the Golden Arches signs always include the tally of how many burgers the company had sold - "over three billion sold," or five billion, six, or seven. I don't remember at what point they stopped counting.

And for all the dollars those billions of burgers sold generated for the chain, never once did I hear of McDonald's complaining that serious restaurant reviewers and critics ignored its offerings in favour of the food at other smaller restaurants  - restaurants where the chefs vied for a review in the New York Times by creating complex, layered, and unique food.

But in response to the critical acclaim and coverage Jonathan Franzen's recent book Freedom received, commercial writers Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult did indeed complain that Franzen's work received more and better attention than did any work of theirs, and that the work of white males, generally, received more attention than did theirs as well.

Jason Pinter, in The Huffington Post (Aug 10/10) interviewed the two authors about the "feud" they have with Franzen, his critics, newspaper reveiwers, and the entire literary world.

Between them, Weiner and Picoult have been on the New York Times bestseller list for months at a time. Between them, they have written over two dozen novels, have generated millions of dollars, and have millions of books in print in several countries.

So why does the literary establishment ignore them?  Picoult believes that her work is like that of Jane Austen or Shakespeare because it was popular, not literary, when written.

Because historically the books that have persevered in our culture and in our memories and our hearts were not the literary fiction of the day, but the popular fiction of the day. Think about Jane Austen. Think about Charles Dickens. Think about Shakespeare. They were popular authors. They were writing for the masses. (Huff Post)

Indeed, these authors were and are popular, but the comparison only goes so far. The quickly growing capitalist, middle class bought the fiction of Austen and Dickens, fiction that was starkly apart from the literary efforts of the aristocracy that had dominated for centuries. (Shakespeare, who wrote plays, not fiction is a different case.)

Gender lines were also quite different then; Jane Austen was told, as were other serious women writers, that no literary work by women would be published because it would never measure up. This is no longer true. Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 comes to mind - one of many examples of women writers well-regarded by the literary establishment.

Millions of readers love and buy Weiner's and Picoult's books, but from what I have read, the work of neither writer has the depth and complexity that the work of Doris Lessing has, or Austen, or Dickens, or Shakespeare, or countless others. To me, their fiction is cliched and formulaic; they work in a genre that was both expanded and refined by someone like Austen. The commercial fiction Weiner and Picoult write does neither; it takes what was done by others and repeats it endlessly with no innovation.

McDonald's doesn't complain that restaurant and food critics are not banging down the door to include it. McDonald's rakes in millions, offering its formulaic product to the millions who love it - smiling all the way to the bank. Commercial writers like Weiner and Picoult should do the same. They offer a standardized product to millions who love it and make lots of money doing so. If they want critical acclaim, they should offer the kind of fiction that commands it.

They do, though, deserve an award for generating publicity!

Weird, Wild, Wonderful 4 - Jan 31 - Feb 6

Some new findings, some old favourites.

ThinkShop, a blog on history, politics, and literature (among other interesting and intelligent musings). This blog is very well-written by an educator who lives in Switzerland.

nthposition online magazine is hard to categorize and certainly extensive. Here are the sections, just to give an idea: Strangeness, Politics, Opinion, Places, People, Poetry, Fiction, Reviews, Artreviews, Discussion, Contributors, Links. Good writing; some eye-opening essays.

In These Times, always interesting, always pointed, always good reading:

In These Times is a newsmagazine committed to political and economic democracy and opposed to the dominance of transnational corporations and the tyranny of marketplace values over human values. In These Times is dedicated to reporting the news with the highest journalistic standards; to informing and analyzing movements for social, environmental and economic justice; and to providing an accessible forum for debate about the policies that shape our future.

Delineating Art, the blog of artist Elaine Cheung offers commentary on art and life. Many of her posts begin with a particular artist or piece and then lead out to a larger point. Thoughtful and interesting.

Faux or No?

When I was a grad student, one of my colleagues wrote spiritual/religious poetry. She sold much of it to the official publications of various denominations and to small magazines and newsletters of individual churches all over the English-speaking world. For at least a couple of years, she made about $2000 - $3000 a year, a very nice addition to her meager student income!

My colleague was an atheist - staunch, loud, and pushy about it, too - but she could sure write poetry that was popular with devout religious people.

I always share this story with my writing classes as a point of discussion about distinguishing between the writer and the written, the truth and the creation. It generates much heated discussion. The question  is about what exactly writers are selling - their authentic experience and beliefs or words on a page -  and when and why it does and doesn't matter.

The answer depends on the genre and its traditions, which shape the expectations of reader and writer.

In news, we expect the truth, and writers, editors, and producers can be rightly fired for faking it. With news, including "soft" news, the facts are the focus. We often know little about the reporter, and sometimes have no byline at all.  Notwithstanding theoretical discussions about truth or about bias, news traditionally is factual.

At the other end of the spectrum is fiction. Novels and short stories may tell us a truth about human existence; but no one expects them to be the literal truth, nor do we expect the writer to have experienced everything in the work, and we do not expect knowledge about the author.

Other genres are less clear cut and can create problems because of lack of knowledge of the tradition or because of readers' expectations, and in some cases, manipulation by writer and/or publisher - memoir, creative non-fiction, even poetry, in the case of my colleague.

I wrote previously about the fiasco over James Frey's book "A Million Little Pieces." My take on his book is that it is memoir and has a narrator who is different from the living, breathing author. That suggests a certain shifting ratio between fact and fiction, which is the tradition of memoir.

I also think that people were justly outraged because the living breathing author appeared on the Oprah show, claiming that he and his narrator were identical with identical experiences.

So, what about my fellow grad student's religious poetry? No one ever asked about her religious beliefs or about any religious affiliation. Everyone accepted the poetry she offered, the words on the page. Several bought her poetry more than once, saying that their readers had especially liked it. One publication asked her to submit more.

I think that people made assumptions about her and about her beliefs and would not have published her poetry if they had known that she was an atheist. But they also proved a point about certain genres and expectations for fact and for knowledge about the writer. The poems she submitted said what they said; they were true as written expression of certain religious sentiment. They were not true expressions of her belief, and she never offered them as such.

Faux, or no? What do you think?

The "Truth" in Memoir

 “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

These lines from John Keats's poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" might well express one side of an argument about truth in literature, most expressly truth in memoir.

In this argument, the beauty in Keats's poem may stand in for the overall effect of a piece, the beauty of the words on the page, the arc of the story, or even the refusal of meaning. Literal, factual truth and embellished "truth"  interact to create the final work. It is unimportant whether the reader knows which is which or the ratio between them. The writer's contract with the reader (if indeed one even exists) is fulfilled by the book the reader holds in her hands.

The other side of the argument about truth in memoir states that memoir is a form of autobiography. It is more than just slightly based on truth: By calling something a memoir, the writer makes a contract with the reader that there is more literal truth in the work than there is embellishment, and whatever embellishment exists is minor and only for artistic purposes or to protect innocent parties. Anything more than minor adjustments constitutes lying.

Anyone familiar with the case of James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces and the furor it caused has heard the argument, which was ultimately played out on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah chose the book for her book club in September 2005, and like all the books she chooses, it went right to the top of the best seller lists.

In January 2006, some smouldering coals about the supposed facts in the book burst into flame and high controversy erupted. (The link is to Wikipedia which has a decent rendering of the events and timelines and links to all the pertinent players.) I don't want to delve into the details of the controversy regarding who said what when; the argument about truth in memoirs is what interests me.

When Frey's embellishments were originally outed, Larry King interviewed him, and Oprah called in to defend him. Her comments employ the "Beauty is truth" side of the argument:

Whether or not the cars' wheels rolled up on the sidewalk or whether he hit the police officer or didn't hit the police officer is irrelevant to me. What is relevant is that he was a drug addict who spent years in turmoil, from the time he was 10 years old, drinking and -- and tormenting himself and his parents...And, out of that, stepped out of that history to be the man that he is today, and to take that message to save other people and allow them to save themselves. That's what's important about this book and his story.

Soon though, Oprah, for reasons unclear, switched to the opposite side of the argument in which literal truth was more important than the beauty of the virtual truth of the message: On her show on January 26/06, Oprah chastized Frey publicly:

James Frey is here and I have to say it is difficult for me to talk to you because I feel really duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers. I think it's such a gift to have millions of people to read your work and that bothers me greatly. So now, as I sit here today I don't know what is true and I don't know what isn't.

Many things followed: Oprah no longer recommended the book; the existing imprint and future ones came to contain a disclaimer that the memoir was semi-fictional; critics and readers debated about "truth" in literature and memoir; both Oprah and James Frey have moved on, neither seemingly the worse for wear. Frey has written and had another book published - Bright Shiny Morning (2008), a safe work of fiction!

The question remains, though, about the nature of memoir and what readers can rightfully expect regarding the truth in a work of art.

In his article "Shelve it under navel-gazing" in The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Ben Yagoda's new book Memoir: A History. Yagoda delves into the long history of memoir and its precursors; he also takes up the question of truth and the concern over truth in memoir that has quite a history itself.

Part of the review deals with memory, which of course has much to do with truth. Yardley quotes Yagoda:

"the human memory is by nature untrustworthy: contaminated not merely by gaps, but by distortions and fabrications that inevitably and blamelessly creep into it." Memory "is itself a creative writer," and the combination of "memory like Swiss cheese, arrogant confidence in its integrity -- seems to be a human trait, and is certainly reflected in most autobiographies . . . which do not grant even the possibility that the chronicle they offer -- including the word-for-word transcription of conversations held half a century before -- is less than 100 percent accurate."

Both Yagoda and Yardley are clear: memoir is unreliable. So what's a reader to do?

I believe that Oprah's and the readers' anger with Frey was, and should have been, not so much because of the fiction that found its way into his memoir. Oprah had it right when she implied that the "truth" of the book was in its beauty, the beauty of Frey's rise out of addiction and the inspiration that gave to the world.

Where it all went terribly wrong was that in public, in person, Frey as himself, not as his memoir's persona, lied about the facts in the book. His publisher got it wrong too. If Frey had invoked the license of literature to give us a virtual truth, he would have been fine and people would have been happy with the beauty and truth his work had given them.

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Inviting Writer

Lola Lemire Tostevin is a Canadian writer (in both French and English) of fiction, poetry and criticism. She taught at York University in Toronto, where she now lives.


I met Tostevin at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. She was writer in residence for one week in the hot summer of 1990. I was a graduate student doing a course in contemporary Canadian literature, and Tostevin shared her work and her thoughts, both at the university and at off-campus social events.


My most vivid memory is of Tostevin reading "Le Baisir de Juan-Les-Pins," part of her in-progress novel Frog Moon (1993).

We sat in a room next to a courtyard, with doors open, hoping for even the smallest breeze. Tostevin began to read and, after a very short time, the room was pin-drop silent, as we forgot the heat and were transfixed by the story and her quiet, but dramatic reading style.

 

Off campus, we congregated at a small backyard cottage rented by one of the other grad students. The conversation and the wine flowed in the evening heat. Tostevin shared her ideas on literature and feminism, and her advice for would be writers.

 

Tostevin was fun, talented, and generous with her time, her work, and her advice.

 

I would like to invite Lola Tostevin to my soiree.