Reality Hunger (8 page)

My medium is prose, not the novel.

Just as
Stop-Time
obliges us ultimately to distinguish between Conroy the author and Frank the character, so
A Fan’s Notes
requires that a similar distinction be drawn between Exley the author and Frederick the character, a distinction that much more difficult to draw because Frederick seems, throughout the course of the narrative, to be writing—or at least trying to write—the very book we’re reading. Which accounts for the greater technical and structural complexity of
A Fan’s Notes
and also explains why a book so carefully created and meticulously ironized was so often criticized for being autobiographically self-indulgent. It’s in this very struggle between literary form and lived life that these two books find the structural tension which transforms Conroy’s “autobiographical narrative” and Exley’s “fictional memoir” into fully accomplished works of art. There are two unmistakable and distinctly positive effects of novels-as-autobiography like Frank Conroy’s
Stop-Time
and Frederick Exley’s
A Fan’s Notes:
first, they deliberately undermine the traditional and largely spurious authority of the novelist by depriving him of his privileged position above
and beyond the world; and second, they narrow the gap that exists between fiction and autobiography, a gap that is artificial to begin with.

The first essay in Bernard Cooper’s
Maps to Anywhere
was selected by Annie Dillard as one of the best essays of 1988, but the book as a whole won the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first work of fiction of 1990, while in the foreword to the book Richard Howard calls the chapters “neither fictions nor essays, neither autobiographical illuminations nor cultural inventions.” The narrator—Howard calls him “the Bernard-figure (like the Marcel-figure, neither character nor symbol)”—is simultaneously “the author” and a fictional creation. From mini-section to mini-section and chapter to chapter, Bernard’s self-conscious and seriocomic attempts to evoke and discuss his own homosexuality, his brother’s death, his parents’ divorce, and Southern California kitsch are woven together to form a beautifully meditative and extremely original bildungsroman. “Maps to anywhere” comes to mean (comes to ask): when a self can (through language, memory, research, and invention) project itself everywhere, and can empathize with anyone or anything, what exactly is a self?

The subtitle of Douglas Coupland’s
Generation X
is “Tales for an Accelerated Culture,” but the front of the book carries a blurb announcing that it’s a novel. Is the book a collection of stories or a novel, nonfiction or fiction? Graphics, statistics, and mock-sociological definitions compete, as marginalia, with the principal text, which consists of “tales” only loosely
connected by the same cast of characters, but very tightly organized around the inability of any of the characters to feel, really, anything. The mixture of nonfiction and fiction—information crowding out imagination—in
Generation X
embodies the idea that these characters, bombarded by mall culture and mass media, feel that they have “McLives” rather than lives.

On the top of each page of Brian Fawcett’s
Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow
appear parables—some fantastic, others quasi-journalistic, and all of which are concerned with mass media’s complete usurpation of North American life (Fawcett is Canadian). On the bottom of each page, meanwhile, runs a book-length footnote about the Cambodian war. The effect of the bifurcated page is to confront the reader with Fawcett’s point: wall-to-wall media represent as thorough a raid on individual memory as the Khmer Rouge.

How can we enjoy memoirs, believing them to be true, when nothing, as everyone knows, is so unreliable as memory? Many memoirs make a virtue of seeming unadorned, unvarnished, but the first and most unforgettable thing we learn about memory is that it’s fallible. Memories, we now know, can be buried, lost, blocked, repressed, even recovered. We remember what suits us, and there’s almost no limit to what we can forget. Only those who keep faithful diaries will know what they were doing at this time, on this day, a year ago. The rest of us recall only the most intense moments, and even these tend to have been mythologized by repetition into well-wrought chapters in the story of our lives. To this extent, memoirs really
can claim to be modern novels, all the way down to the presence of an unreliable narrator.

If no formal distinction exists either way, then the defining question to be asked of memoirs concerns nothing less than the degree of truthfulness they seem to manifest. This is where today’s eager appetite for self-consciousness seems contradictory.

The lyric essayist seems to enjoy all the liberties of the fiction writer, with none of a fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that
none of this ever really happened
—which a fiction writer daily wakes to. One can never say of the lyric essayist’s work that “it’s just fiction,” a vacuous but prevalent dismissal akin to criticizing someone with his own name. “Lyric essay” is a rather ingenious label, since the essayist supposedly starts out with something real, whereas the fiction writer labors under a burden to prove, or create, that reality, and can expect mistrust and doubt from a reader at the outset. In fiction, lyricism can look like evasion, special pleading, pretension. In the essay, it’s apparently artistic, a lovely sideshow to The Real that, if you let it, will enhance what you think you know. The implied secret is that one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then to do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers, take note. Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.

Today the most compelling creative energies seem directed at nonfiction.