The Two Cultures

Meditations on fiction and nonfiction

Glass Century is out. Please order it now. Go to your local bookstore and request it. In Manhattan, P&T Knitwear is getting a new shipment so head there. On Monday, May 12th, I’ll be in Philadelphia with Adrian Nathan West talking Glass Century. If you’re there, come get a ticket and say hello. If you are interested in the e-book, please order it from Barnes & Noble, where it’s readily available.

The reviews continue to roll in. Vol. 1 Brooklyn declared Glass Century a Book of the Month, and noted advance reviews have been “terrific.” Kazuo Robinson, in an elegant essay, says Glass Century “has a momentum continuing on past the final page … It is rather pregnant: one can picture and hear it multiplying down the pages of another book.” Adam Fleming Petty writes that Glass Century “made me sit up—like, literally, physically sit up—in excitement.” (What I’ve enjoyed about the reviews, in general, are the divergent perspectives. Robinson wants less of Vengeance, the vigilante, and Fleming Petty wants more. Who’s right?)

---

Since releasing a new novel last week, I’ve been asked several times about the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction. A vast majority of readers know me for my journalism and essays. That’s how I came to prominence, if prominence is the right word, and that’s also how I make a living. Novels, in general, do not earn much money. Glass Century, in my view, has been a great success so far—I’m gratified with the reception, and there’s more to come—but it is, in every sense, a labor of love. When I first began writing seriously, at eighteen, I wanted to be a novelist, and I never wavered on that front even as I progressed in the world of journalism. My nonfiction writing—of which this newsletter is, of course, a major part—will always matter a great deal to me, but fiction is the first love. I want to be known for the fiction I produce. Slowly, I see that happening.

When I get asked about fiction and nonfiction, there’s an intriguing subtext to the question—one, at the minimum, of surprise. How does an individual do both? How to merge the worlds of essay, reportage, and the novel? One answer I give, almost immediately, is that it’s somewhat ahistorical to be surprised at all. In the twentieth century, it was much more common for journalists and nonfiction writers to publish novels. Jimmy Breslin, famed as a newspaper columnist, published several novels of varying quality, as did Pete Hamill, his tabloid rival. Joan Didion was a novelist before she was an essayist (Run, River) and Susan Sontag always hoped to be taken seriously for her fiction. It’s important to remember that the novel, as an art form, was once placed at the center of the greater culture; generations of writers dreamed of publishing novels in order to win prestige. Now that the accoutrements of conventional literary success no longer go as far—rave reviews are not life-changing in the same manner, nor are major awards—there are probably fewer nonfiction writers who aim to pursue fiction. Status explains so much in this world, and when a certain kind of writing no longer commands the respect (and lucre) it once did, ambitions shift. If I were a different sort of person, I’d be writing splashy, tell-all politics books. But I dislike those books! They weary me. I believe in the novel, in the way the monks in A Canticle for Leibowitz devote themselves to their Catholicism while dwelling in a radiation-scorched desert.

Just as the nonfiction writer turns away from the novel, too many novelists today have an unsophisticated grasp of politics. The politics of your contemporary American novelists are predictably lib in a midcult kind of way, and I find it all very tiring, even if I might agree with the positions taken. Some of today’s novelists are like little plastic toys—smack the button and the catchphrases crackle out. Once upon a time, the greatest writers of our age had a range of fascinating or even disturbing politics. Fascists and monarchists wrote fabulous novels and poetry, as did committed liberals, leftists, and communists. Roth was against the Vietnam War, but Updike was for it. In some sense, the literary establishment of the twentieth century far better represented America’s multifarious polity. Now they all blandly vote Democrat. Or they believe in a particular kind of liberalism, one that is performative and reeks of professional-class smugness. Like anyone, I’d like to be successful in the literary world, but I’m happy my friends and colleagues are, for the most part, the more captivating outsiders. I am glad to say my social life never bores me.

What I long for is a sophisticated reintegration of the fiction and nonfiction worlds. Too many philistines populate the media industrial complex. Too many novelists have half-formed opinions they’ve gleaned from a few Times op-eds. It doesn’t have to be this way. Personally, I relish toggling between the modes. Nonfiction, on the whole, is easier because it’s naturally more formulaic: whether you’re writing a journalistic feature or a column, there are clear conventions to follow and you must, in almost every instance, obey them. Editors of news sections and opinion pages want you to write in a certain manner, which is fine, and there are house styles to mimic. On Substack, I am my own editor, and hence you get the rangy Ross, my voice a tad bit more supple and discursive. I feel most unfettered. Even here, though, there is a structure, a formula, the diktats of nonfiction taking precedence. I can never quite summon the mad wonder of a Sam Kriss, a John Pistelli, or a Justin Smith-Ruiu. The mystics aren’t yet speaking to me. My Third Eye is halfway shut, or at least encrusted.

The glaring difference between fiction and nonfiction is the ability to leave yourself—to enter into another consciousness, to invest in an inner life. This is why, with few exceptions, I was never drawn to modern autofiction, which reads as de facto memoir, a tedious retelling of a writer’s existence that pretends it’s a novel. There’s no curiosity about how others live. I was asked in an interview about a scene in Glass Century in which one of the main characters, Saul Plotz, meets a young Donald Trump in the 1970s. Plotz, a liberal Republican—yes, this sort of politico could exist very easily a half century ago—is plainly repulsed by both the twentysomething Donald and his father, Fred, who was a powerful real estate developer. Since I’ve been a critic of Donald in my nonfiction writing, am I simply imposing my views on a character here? No. I am imagining what a liberal, albeit a conflicted one, might make of the Trumps then, since they are begging for a tax break and warning about demographic shifts in the five boroughs. At the same time, there are characters in my novel who would probably not be conflated with me at all. Tad, Saul’s son, is an alienated loner who roams America, falls into a drug habit, and remakes himself in a strange, startling fashion. As an author, I unspool Tad’s consciousness, and imagine how he might approach the world, even if it’s radically different than how I would perceive events or proceed through my own life. In any novel, the characters are, at least in part, a function of the author because they all spring from the individual mind, but the imagination, in the act of writing, is an agent that acts upon the reality of the novel’s psychic architecture. It is both conscious and subconscious; I have written dialogue and found my characters, gloriously, running away from me.

Human consciousness, then, is what I am drawn to most. It is what artificial intelligence can never have. It is why an influence on my work, not initially obvious, is Virginia Woolf and the Modernists who dealt most directly with how to render human consciousness on the page. I am not merely interested in events; nonfiction is for events. The recreation of consciousness in nonfiction comes from interviews with another person, an individual sharing what their inner monologue might be to an interlocutor. But something will always be lost in translation. There’s a percentage of every human being’s inner life that can never be known by anyone else except that human being. When a person dies, they take that inner life with them. The novelist, then, can perform a miracle: approximate that consciousness and reach inside a person. It is make-believe, but maybe the most essential kind of leap. There are few actions that are more human. Of course, nonfiction has its own element of make-believe. A journalist is an observer, constantly making selections—snipping reality up—and rearranging them to particular specifications. The journalist is not so different than the photographer, who chooses what patch of color or flesh to capture with the machine, and perhaps goes about manipulating it later.

If anything else, I hope the worlds of fiction and nonfiction can better understand each other. We need fewer philistines and fewer authors with quarter-baked conceptions of politics and society. Novelists and nonfiction writers must face outwards. They must not lose their ambition nor their curiosity. We live in a specialist’s age: in just about every realm of life now, there’s an implicit or explicit tug towards narrowness. We are segmented, algorithmized, and polarized. In athletics, the three-sport high school star is fast becoming extinct as talented teens are pressured to play one sport and one sport only in the hopes that scouts will notice them sooner and the payday will be larger. They are more likely to get injured, focusing exclusively on the muscles required for their individual sport; they don’t allow their bodies the flexibility and relief of performing different activities in different seasons. The specialized writer isn’t far from this. He risks mental calcification, the loss of nimbleness. He staggers on, his output exhausting and his spirit exhausted. The written word should be vibrant, infused with hints of daring and wonder. Why sit in the defensive crouch? Why stay in the corner? There’s so much left to do. If old worlds are collapsing, new ones are slowly being born. And in this rebirth, there may be less of a need to shrink into our silos and huddle among the usual compatriots. Everything that rises must converge, and it’s usually best that it does.