The best thing I read this week was James Wood’s review of Hilary Mantel’s new novel, Bring Up the Bodies, a sequel to her last novel, Wolf Hall. Caveat emptor: Though I have not read Bring Up the Bodies yet, I am really into Hilary Mantel, creepily so (though I like to think she’d like that). Wolf Hall is the kind of thing I hope I’ll be able to write one day,* all serious and intellectual but also from the gut, touchable, even though she’s reaching across centuries to inhabit the mind of Henry VIII’s advisor Thomas Cromwell. Wood, it seems, concurs, even though he finds it goes slower in midsection. What he likes about Mantel, he says, is something he calls “novelistic intelligence”:
Mantel knows what to select, how to make her scenes vivid, how to kindle her characters. She seems almost incapable of abstraction or fraudulence; she instinctively grabs for the reachably real.
I think this applies further than Mantel, and further than historical fiction, and further than fiction itself. I’ve spent this year studying how to write long-form nonfiction. (I have probably not mentioned this yet, because I am sometimes ambivalent about Being In School at my age, but I’m enrolled in the Literary Reportage concentration at NYU’s journalism school.) And all that I can say about it, after nine months of my nose held to the stuff, is that the only thing that seems to matter is selection. The world is so much. The only way to slice it is to actually slice some of it off. It’s what distinguishes, to borrow someone else’s phrase, the true from the verbatim.
I thought of this when I came across the excerpt from David Maraniss’s forthcoming biography of Obama that appeared on Vanity Fair‘s website this week. While the internet was debating the pretentiousness of Obama’s thoughts on Eliot or the fact that he made some kind of a composite of his girlfriends in Dreams From My Father, I kept thinking that what bothered me most about the passage was the way it was written. Maraniss went for the all-encompassing approach; he gives me actual street addresses of everywhere Obama lives, and also every apartment Obama’s girlfriend happens to occupy. He quotes multiple passages from one of Obama’s girlfriend’s diaries, and rather than giggle at the twenty-something dreaminess of them I thought: how many lines from her diary does he need to establish that she felt Obama was emotionally distant? At a certain point I began to wonder if the over-quotation wasn’t a form of deliberate cruelty.
And then there are digressions like this:
The initials “B.I.” in that journal entry stood for Obama’s employer, Business International, located at 1 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, on Second Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets. Business International had been operating for nearly 30 years by the time Obama went to work there. Established in 1954, its stated goal was “to advance profitable corporate and economic growth in socially desirable ways.” What that entailed, for the most part, was compiling and constantly updating newsletters and reference materials for corporations that did business around the world.
My eyes began to glaze over. I’m not trying to be mean there; it’s simply the truth. The only things I want to know from a biography of Obama, myself, are not raw data. I want to know tiny things that actually tell me something about who he is, and I need the writer to have a better sense of which they are. To include so much just makes me feel like the writer is desperate, like he can’t puzzle the thing out for himself.
I do want to write a biography, too, someday. I don’t think I’d ever do a President even if someone wanted me to; the narrative would be ver-determined from the get-go. Getting to be President, even in the post-Bush II era, is undeniably an important achievement. It’s hard to write a readable portait of someone like that. The clichés pile up too easily when you’re writing about someone whose breakfast and beer choices are weighted with diplomatic and political consequence.
Some biographers do manage to escape this — Robert Caro comes to mind, and I saw him Wednesday night, where he affirmed that, indeed, at the age of 76, he and his wife are planning to move to Vietnam so they can study the place before completing the volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography that deals with the years of that War. But I have every bit of faith that he will not parse every blad of grass he finds there, because Caro is serious about understanding Johnson, not just cataloguing him. Hopefully, one day, Obama’ll get someone who wants to treat him that way too.
** Though actually, it is not my favourite Mantel. My favourite is Mantel’s early novel Beyond Black, in which an overweight psychic named Alison Hart tries to cope with the spirits that surround her, with the help of an ascetic assistant. It is funny and ribald and inventive and dark and ambitious and exactly not the kind of of novel that the dreary critical narrative claims as “women’s writing.” There are no children and no home and there is no domestic drama beyond Alison’s sufferings at the hand of her spirit guide, prosaically named Morris. Seriously, you must read it, it’s fabulous.