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Sneak. Bully. Disingenuous. A wolf in journalist’s clothing. Exasperating. Flimsy. Hack. A dirty fighter. Facile. Lazy. Preening. Pretentious. Outrageous. Grandstanding. Hollow. Harmful.

These are cherry-picked gems from mature and objective publications like Salon, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. On the same Sunday, the Times saw fit to use the front page of the Book Review and coveted space in the Magazine on D’Agata, a puzzling treatment of a paperback-only release from a writer that—as the reviewers take great joy in pointing out—isn’t well heard of outside of academia. These are journalists reviewing a work whose author (one of its authors, that is) questions some of the tenets that they’ve been taught to hold sacred.

The result? We get review titles like, “The Art of Fact Checking.” That one was from The New Yorker’s “Book Bench” blog. Does it make me pretentious to point out that fact-checking is not an art? It has been, from its inception, a litigious activity. It takes talent and intelligence and incredible drive, but still fact-checkers are part paralegal, part private eye. Yet the reviewer, a New Yorker staff fact checker, has something to prove, and so a review becomes a pout.

I don’t mean to attack fact-checking or those who do it. Neither, incidentally, did D’Agata make such a general claim, something that reviewers may have noticed if they read the text. I was a fact-checker before I was lost to the seedy underworld of the essay. I landed one of those New York magazine internships for the over-educated and under-paid. I took my work very seriously, and I am still proud of it. But that doesn’t mean that I was always serving a greater good or forcing writers to be less lazy, a claim many have thrown at D’Agata.

I can’t help but think of the columns that I’d get in from that magazine’s big shots and how they would occasionally have paragraphs laying out a passionate political argument and containing, as a command: [INSERT STRONGEST NUMBER HERE]. More than once, I asked a hardcore journalist for their source, and they gave me their own book, claiming to have no memory of how they verified the fact the first time around. The editors would end up ruling that, as long is it was printed once, it could be again. Then there was my own itsy first by-line. I wrote a blurb about voter registration and cited a number that ACORN had provided me. The fact-checker did their due-diligence. The fact was confirmed and ran. A week later, ACORN admitted that they inflated the number. The article, once accurate and verified, was suddenly wrong.

I’m not saying that these anecdotes prove fact-checking is irrelevant or that nothing means anything, or that proof, itself, is a lie bought and sold by the frightened middle class with their white picket fences. What these exchanges revealed to me is how fascinating a conversation can come up when this issue is pushed; when fact-checkers (as often happens) go to battle with writers and sometimes editors; when people bring competing goals and backgrounds and perspectives to a piece of writing that examines the real world.

D’Agata cites Cicero and St. Augustine as essayists who moved dubiously through facts while still contemplating and representing reality. Such a nod to history seems to be offensive and untrustworthy to major news outlets, so let’s get hipper. When Truman Capote went back and forth with the New Yorker over the verifiability of In Cold Blood, his editors and fact-checkers weren’t dumb squares, nor he a liar. They were negotiating the grey area of reality as it’s filtered through what an observer wants to present. Though some are still opposed to Capote’s methods, that doesn’t mean his book is somehow less beautiful or sinister or invalid. Or what of Gay Talese’s claim that the magazine piece is no longer artful because of the reliance on a tape recorder? He has said that recording is a legal tool, not a creative one, which creates quotes that, “Don’t get at what people mean, but rather what’s coming out of their mouths.” Or what about David Foster Wallace? Plenty of tributes have pointed out that he created stock, straw men characters, inflated and conflated scenes, and generally Wallace-ized his essays.

Yes, some of the liberties that D’Agata flaunts (“thirty-four strip clubs has a nicer rhythm than thirty-one”) push farther than these examples. I don’t agree with everything D’Agata says. I think a lot of it is intensified for comic effect. But he is investigating the same, ever-sliding middle ground. He and Fingal publicize, dramatize, and ultimately satirize the endless argument. That’s what is being missed in the hysterical and furious treatment of this book.

Lifespan isn’t John D’Agata telling you to agree with him. It isn’t a screed. It is about the value and frustration within a debate about truth. The layout of the book is as affecting and unique as any I’ve seen. We see the text in the center, then swirls of conversation around it, paragraphs and paragraphs of impassioned arguments fencing in a single sentence. Through the use of color – black meaning proven fact, red meaning unverified – we watch the machinations of a sentence that can be right and wrong at once, a piece gaining, losing, and changing meaning in front of our eyes. Through these framing exchanges, each author makes himself incredibly vulnerable. D’Agata’s character on the page is shrill at times and certainly defensive. You can sense embarrassment at places, as well as the joy of taking shots at a cocky subordinate. Fingal – yes, he has a personality and a perspective in the book, too – fluctuates between sincerity and the stubborn-young-dude need to feel right. They dramatize themselves the way that Hunter S. Thompson did and Joan Didion still does.

The sad thing is that a push for a conversation seems to be an exercise in futility. Some of D’Agata’s geeky students and admirers (myself quite obviously included) will defend this work in publications that the Times and Salon, as well as many of their readers, will never look at. Meanwhile those major publications seem content running character assassinations not just of one artist, but of a challenging way of thinking. A quick gander at the comment section of any of these reviews reveals a long list of people who never have read D’Agata, will never read Lifespan, and remain confident that they know the books intended purpose – a brainwashing from a liar. What’s worse, as was evidenced in AWP panels with blurbs like, “How to write beautiful and 100% true nonfiction” (imagine the fun a fact-checker would have with that claim), other writers see the need to fall in line with attacks on a book whose spine they’ve never cracked. Their message to the masses – He’s a liar; I’m not. It’s that simple.

For those who care so deeply about accuracy, that impression is absurdly and irresponsibly wrong. The book is a two-sided argument. It’s an invitation inside the way artists and researchers, and culture as a whole, contemplate and justify what truth means in nonfiction. I’m not saying you should agree with John D’Agata. That’s not the point. But why not be open? Experience it. Don’t write off an uncomfortable conversation. Engage in it.

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Time was, let’s say the 1940s, there were Reporters and there were Authors. The former wore charcoal suits and punched a timeclock and gathered the five Ws and the H, while the latter wore undershirts, sipped jug wine, and during regular business hours violated social mores and sometimes the Mann Act. A Reporter like Joseph Mitchell might venture into bohemia and fire dispatches back to a respectable publication, and rarer still a Reporter whose life was so allegorical to his times, say George Orwell, would capture the zeitgeist simply by writing about himself, but mostly the classes did not overlap. The Reporter was an employee, while the Author—in the words of Tom Wolfe “that ego-flushed little bastard with the unbuttoned shirt and the wind rushing through his locks”—was an artist.

Then the 60s, and everything got mixed up. Reporters like Wolfe and Gay Talese scrapped the triangular news story and rebuilt it with the voice, characters and suspense of a novel. Novelists Truman Capote and Joan Didion made tabloid news about murder and hippies resonate like Dostoyevsky. Would-be Authors Hunter Thompson and Michael Herr landed jobs for The Nation and Rolling Stone and Esquire, infusing their reporting with hallucinations. The New Journalists captured the era better than novelists like Updike and Roth and Bellow who flattered by imitation their forebears, but took three times as many pages to do it. And the authors who expressed the upheaval through experimentation, like Richard Brautigan and Thomas Pynchon and Ken Kesey, already feel gimmicky. Sometimes A Great Notion, which when I was 22 seemed a masterpiece, struck me at 40 as a belabored copy of Faulkner; but Tom Wolfe’s portrait of the swashbuckler in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test rings fresh. How strange that the Reporter captured the Author better than the Author himself.

All that happened before I was born. By the time I reached writing age, both novels and New Journalism had been displaced in houses of publishing by the memoir. Tobias Wolff and Mary Karr and Kathyrn Harrison made the autobiography something we’d like to read not just today but well into the future. But by the mid-zeroes, the pool was soiled with hundreds of knock-offs and weepy tales of self-acceptance, many of them not memoirs at all but B-grade novels exploiting the industry’s fact-checking loophole for autobiographers.

What innovations, then, for us? Those of us who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s had the suspicion that our country’s best years were behind us. We were told that ours was a nation of moral strength and innovative spirit and liberty for all, but as soon as we turned off the television and looked around, we saw little evidence. Instead we saw a country that was derivative and synthetic: a second-rate clone of America. Entire cities were built behind walls, where sprawling cul-de-sacs prioritized ample parking and commuter convenience at the expense of knowing the people on your street. The creative spirit that spawned jazz and rock and the American novel—art forms that surely connected us—had withered, replaced by franchise movies based on video games, pre-teen pop singers, and choreographed game shows. The western wilderness with its seemingly endless resources and wonder had long since closed, its picturesque states now peppered with a curious mix of post-industrial waste and pay-to-enter “recreation areas.” The nation that pioneered religious liberty had contracted a case of schizophrenia, its people dispersing to the fringes, at one end the credit-card circuses of blubbering TV charlatans, and at the other end some lower-case spiritualism whose primary ingredients appeared to be self-help, psychotherapy, and yoga. The question facing us at millennium’s end was: how can we possibly survive all this goddamn freedom?

A couple of works of fiction—I’m thinking of The Virgin Suicides and A Visit From The Goon Squad—tackled this question with startling innovation that left me lightheaded, but for the most part the genre that has best responded best to this generational dilemma of seeking truth amidst the untruth we were handed, has not been fiction or journalism or memoir, but the essay, and not the inward solipsism of EB White or Annie Dillard, but something new, some seven-legged creature that announced its big ideas in the voice and narrative of fiction, depicted its crises with the vulnerable revelations of memoir, and gathered evidence with the actual legwork of reporting. David Foster Wallace pioneered it with his hyper-observed visits to a cruise ship, a state fair, and a porn festival—Gulliver washing onto the shores of what at first would appear a make-believe world and slapping his forehead and saying, Wow, this is really how we live now. Elizabeth Gilbert did it with her book-length profile of a modern-day mountain man, a walking talking metaphor for all the forks in the road America did not choose over the past century. Others who turned themselves into astonished characters romping through hyperreality were Sarah Vowell, Scott Carrier, Evan Wright, and George Saunders.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

None that I’m aware of has so totally metastasized into this new thing, this jagged-toothed peeing-on-the-floor tail-wagging beast, as John Jeremiah Sullivan (b. 1974), whose new collection Pulphead should be hailed not simply as a fabulous piece of writing but as a landmark debut of a new genre, invented by others but perfected here.

Much of the collection entails Sullivan the reporter bellyflopping into circus americanus, skewering and celebrating its reality TV, Michael Jackson and teenage Christian rock fests. It’s fertile ground, and Sullivan is always tapping the faux façade over what is real, such as when he drolly notes that Axl Rose appears to be wearing an Axl Rose mask, or that the aging rocker’s famous snaky slide-foot dance “reminds me of one’s wasted redneck uncle trying to ‘do his Axl Rose’ after a Super Bowl party.” We get it: Axl the person is not Axl the celebrity, and though this does not come as a revelation, it’s dazzling when Sullivan demonstrates it. These pieces remind me of the best of Wallace and Tom Wolfe, that wide-eyed lit crit with his fifty-cent words embedded in the vibrant stupidity of pop culture. One would be right to say that endeavoring to reveal our country’s meta-reality by writing about reality TV is just shooting fish in barrel, but nonetheless: this fellow hits a lot of fish. What distinguishes Sullivan from his influences is that he doesn’t stand outside the party lobbing irony bombs, but rather exuberantly professes his adoration of Guns N Roses, Michael Jackson, The Real World, even Jesus. It changes the tone from snarky to sweet, and that matters. Perhaps what keeps even the best journalists from affecting us the way novelists do is that critical distance, and by including himself in the pool of fools, Sullivan achieves pathos that the others lack. (It’s a delicate dance, and the one instance where he stumbles is trying to convince us that he shares the same goals as the Tea Party marchers and Glenn Beck’s 9/12 event; it feels like a thin conceit, rather than his honest fanship for the Road Rules.)

The rest of the essays are more traditional memoir, the tightly wrought and poetically moving stories you’d hear from Tobias Wolff or Mary Karr. Even if these, Sullivan remains aware of that filter or falseness with which we’ve come to view reality: in a sublime essay about the near-death electrocution of his brother, Sullivan is sure to mention that he learned many of the details about his family’s own story by watching it depicted on William Shatner’s reality show, Rescue 911, in which, in a gorgeous twist, the brother reenacted an event of which he has no memory.

The essays that soar most gracefully, though, are those where he does both things—memoir and reporting—at once. Sullivan digresses in the Rose profile to a glimpse of his own Indiana upbringing, and suddenly the piece isn’t about a foolish celebrity, but about the small town despair and the collapse of Midwestern optimism. A comedy of errors about renting out his home as a set for a TV show becomes a meditation on what it means to be a real father in an unreal world. Most memorable is his voyage to Creation, the Christian rock festival. He frames this second-rate magazine assignment as a mock-epic, complete with biblical allusions (“in the beginning”), snarky puns (“my voyage to Creation”) and even the trappings of a hero’s quest, with a fellow pilgrim who “rolled down her window, leaned halfway out, and blew a long, clear note on a ram’s horn.” Sullivan falls in with some West Virginians “on fire for Christ” who appear to live in the woods and subsist on wild frogs and what not, perhaps like the early disciples. But whereas an equally accomplished ironist might have fed these boys to the lions, mocking their ernest evangelicism so foolish to New York magazine readers, Sullivan on page 23 makes a most startling turn, and reveals his own born-again teen years, and then ditching the cynicism altogether he turns the thing upside down and ends on a sincere note of admiration—even envy—for his new Christian friends.”Knowing it isn’t true doesn’t mean you would be strong enough to believe it if it were.”

Sullivan is aware that in these most dire of times, irony alone will not feed the patient. While I know of a few writers who plunge as fearlessly into the discharge of the culture machine, I know of none other with the courage—yes courage—to float back clinging shamelessly to its flotsam. “This is us,” Sullivan concludes: “a people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.”

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First you have to tell them about the format. Yes: there are brief interviews. But you don’t hear the questions and you don’t know who is doing the interviewing or why. It’s best, you explain, to think of it as a collection of short stories—and there are some plain old stories in there. But then you have to try to successfully relate what happens in the “plain old stories” about the poet and the kid on the high dive, which again, is not easy.

You might try saying something like, “There’s one story ‘The Depressed Person’ that amazed me, because it starts as this sympathetic portrait of someone struggling with the genuine misery of depression, but it slowly shifts until, before you know it you’re taking this pitiless look at the narcissism and selfishness of this person, and the self-serving, self-help jargon that enables her. And what’s really something is that in the end it manages to be both sympathetic and pitiless.” It might not work to follow that up by saying, even though you are impressed by it, “The other funny thing is, ‘The Depressed Person’ is one of the most annoying things I’ve ever read, but mostly because it’s so well written it’s like actually being in the room with a really annoying selfish person. Except for the sympathetic part. Which is sad in retrospect, knowing what the author struggled with.” That last bit will also require explanation, if they aren’t already aware, which prompts that face people tend to make when you suggest they might like an author who has committed suicide.

This may or may not be the best time to tell them that there are some very long footnotes.

You’ll want to tell them that Brief Interviews does in fact have some very straightforward stuff that goes beginning to middle to end, but even those can be pretty wildly experimental. Like the one about the insecure wife that starts normal but then breaks down into what seems like the draft of a script for a movie or TV show. Or the one about the painter, which is a crushingly sad story—but you don’t want to say why because it’s best to see it slowly take shape out of a softly-smudged and beautiful kind of impressionistic style that you never figured Wallace was capable of until you saw him master it. Try reassuring them that stories still get told, and that the book is not one of those things that people like to wave their hands and call “mental masturbation.” That’s when you realize, however, that maybe you shouldn’t be recommending the book to your co-worker or your wife’s friend knowing that it frequently mentions actual masturbation, as well as a variety of odd erotic behaviors, callous sexual and emotional manipulation, more than one instance of rape, vivid descriptions of bathroom activity and bodily fluids and something awful with a Jack Daniels bottle.

Note that if you mention all of that stuff it gets harder to explain how the book is actually very funny.

It’s probably best to stick to that point about “mental masturbation,” and explain that to “enjoy” this kind of experimental fiction—which can seem hostile to people who “just read for fun” and can feel like it’s just for cynical crowds who say you must not “get it” if you don’t like it—is actually to invert that cynicism. To be willing to have fun reading someone who wants to tell a story but is trying to do that in a new and interesting way. The trick is not to raise a cynicism against old fiction but to drop the cynicism to new fiction, and approach it with a sort of childlike wonder and joy.

If you get that far, though, you might add that the word “joy” is not one you would necessarily use to describe the book. Try explaining all this while wondering to yourself if you give David Foster Wallace a pass because it’s such, like, a thing to discuss his books and be seen reading them on the bus.

If you’re talking to the right person, you could point out that Brief Interviews is probably one of the greatest explorations of modern heterosexual gender interaction in American literature. If they’re not into that kind of stuff, try just saying that it’s basically two hundred and eighty pages on why the expression “man up” is utter bullshit and why those ads are so terrible. (Be careful if you’ve been drinking here. It could get out of hand.) Try explaining that even though the interviewed men are accurately “hideous” they aren’t that different from people you probably know. It’s more like how we are all pretty hideous on a daily basis. Make sure to say that they shouldn’t watch the movie first but should try it out afterward.

Try explaining it like this: “If you don’t read it, you will never read anything else like it.” Try explaining what a gift that is. That might work.

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Originally published in France in 2008, Edouard Levé’s Suicide is a nonlinear, almost plotless meditation on living and dying, and the torment of time. The novel, which was the Levé’s first book be translated into English, begins (perhaps not surprisingly) with a suicide. The narrator’s friend, an unnamed “you” addressed throughout the story, leaves the house with his wife to play tennis, but tells her he has forgotten something, goes back inside, and shoots himself in the head. The novel spends the next hundred or so pages exploring the life of the “you” through little scenes of everyday life, mixed with meditations on the psyche of the friend. Levé abruptly shifts back and forth between the two sections through declarative statements and unpolished transitions into scene in a way that can be jarring at first, but quickly settles into a readable rhythm. After a scene of the narrator and the friend drinking, Levé whooshes out of the stage of action, and writes, “You kept your day planners from previous years. You would reread them when you doubted your existence.” There is no palpable reason for the transitions or the order, but as Levé states, “To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.”

The friend believed that, “A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived.” In this declaration, we find the core of the friend’s unhappiness: an inability to live with time. He loved literature so much because, “You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm.” For him, “the past would be forever improving, the future would draw you forward, but the present would weigh you down.” There are hints throughout the book that if only the joy of the future, of potential, could be wrangled in the present, happiness would be within reach. We learn that the friend “would like to receive, along with invitations, the menus of the dinners to which you had been invited, in order to delight in advance over the dishes you would consume. To future pleasures would have been added a sequence of present desires.” But on anti-depressants the friend finds the eternal present, the living-in-the-moment that has proved so elusive, and finds it terrible: “Your memory of recent events became thin. You didn’t retain the stories just told you. In the middle of anecdote, you asked yourself how it had begun…One week after having started to take the new anti-depressant, you had become a ghost.”

What redeems this novel is that the great majority of the book does not wallow in depression and despair—it shows one person trying to find a way to live and another attempting to reconcile his friend’s suicide with the quietly charming man he knew. And the meditations on friendship and memory are some of the most beautiful portions of the book:

A ruin is an accidental aesthetic object. If it becomes beautiful, this was certainly not the intention. A ruin is not constructed or maintained. The tendency of a ruin is to crumble down into a heap. The most beautiful parts remain standing despite their wear and tear. The memory of you is what stays up, your body what subsides. Your ghost remains upright in memory, while your skeleton is decomposing in the earth.

It is worth mentioning that Levé took his own life ten days after turning in the manuscript of Suicide. I bring it up here and not earlier, because, as David Lipsky wrote about David Foster Wallace, “Suicide is such a powerful end, it reaches back and scrambles the beginning.” I do not want to scramble the beginning, because Suicide, like an entrancing ruin, stands on its own quite beautifully. Yet the jacket copy of the novel brings the death of the author to forefront. The first two sentences tell the reader how to interpret the content: “Levé delivered the manuscript for his final book, Suicide, just a few days before he took his own life. Suicide is not, then, simply another novel—it is, in a sense, the author’s own oblique, public suicide note.” It’s not the first sentence I have a problem with so much as the second. Reading the novel as a suicide note is just as limiting as reading a David Foster Wallace piece with suicidal overtones—say, “The Depressed Person” or “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”—as merely a reflection of the author’s inner anguish; it is so much more.

But in a book this fearless and original, there are bound to be weaknesses. Like many French authors, Levé indulges in the occasional philosophic-sounding statement that exists more for its initial beauty than its content: “Distinction, which is the opposite of discretion, was too visible a version of elegance.” Sentences like these are like lyrics to foreign pop songs: They sound pretty, but what the hell do they mean? When Levé recounts a dream where the friend swims around with all his former lovers, making love to one after another, he succumbs to another classic French tendency wherein the author assumes that promiscuity, womanizing, and sexual fantasy are inherently substantive.

Thankfully, these faults are far, far outweighed by the intense originality and emotional force of the book. And the book’s translator, Jan Steyn, artfully maintained the integrity of the text. With a passage like this, “One night, in a large town in Provence, you walked for three hours at night,” a lesser translator would be tempted to smooth over the inelegant repetition of “night.” Steyn understands the importance of night to the story—this was when the friend felt that time was moving less, felt less obligated to be happy and less like he wanted to die—and leaves the deliberate choppiness intact.

Late in the novel, the narrator says, “If each event consisted of its beginning, its becoming real, and its completion, you would prefer the beginning…In their beginnings, events preserve the potential that they lose in their completion.” But he goes on to say, “It’s strange that while loving beginnings, you terminated yourself: suicide is an end. Did you consider it a beginning?” While one can cannot know if Levé was relating his own feelings towards suicide in this passage, with another Levé translation slated for release next year, for American readers, Levé’s suicide is just the beginning.

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“In a faint echo of the (frequently too academic) debate about the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, the question of whether or not either of these statements are empirically true, as descriptions of Wallace, strikes me as beside the point. The relevant question is to ask whether, as descriptions of Franzen’s agony over his friend, they are honest.”

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Michael Schur, the man who co-created the tv show, “Parks and Rec,” is reproducing a scene from Infinite Jest in music-video form. Schur’s directorial debut is the coexistence of both his favorite band (the Decemberists) and the novel that most profoundly altered his mind. Today is its internet premiere.

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He defined a writing style that has permeated through the blogosphere. His ability to combine legal diction with colloquialisms and “slacker lingo,” all to express one highly philosophical argument was indeed a DFW idiosyncrasy—one being reproduced by “a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.” Newton writes on the evolution of this trend and what has become of irony.

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The conversation was part of a larger collection of pieces that highlighted foreign authors, movie directors and artists who were not well known in Russia. DFW applies his insight to the topics of American consumerism, pop culture and the modern state of American literature (a topic that he initially responds to with, “Ugggggghhhhh.”)

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