The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal (Norton)
Reporters and fact checkers disagree about the accuracy of articles every day. Seldom, however, do the disputes last beyond deadline — and very few last seven years.
Such was the case with John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. In 2003, D’Agata penned a piece for the Believer about a young man’s suicide in Las Vegas. When Fingal, then an intern at the magazine, was assigned to fact check, he found that D’Agata had fudged a number of details — everything from how many teenagers kill themselves in Nevada each year to how long it would take for a body to fall from the top of the Stratosphere casino. D’Agata objected to most changes, and an epic argument began that lasted until the piece was published in 2010. “The Lifespan of a Fact” offers D’Agata’s work alongside his and Fingal’s heated discussion of what truth is and when it matters.
“This is an essay, so journalistic rules don’t belong here,” writes D’Agata, who says he altered numbers and names for “rhythm” or to appeal to “readers who care about interesting sentences and the metaphorical effect that the accumulation of those sentences achieve.” “It shouldn’t need a fact-checker,” he concludes. Fingal replies: “I applaud anyone’s search for The Truth, The Artistic Truth, or any other kind of Truth that you can finagle this argument to be about, but when you change the factual qualities of a thing to suit your own artistic interests, you’re creating something that never existed.”
Debates about truth in nonfiction are older than the cases of and Stephen Glass: Edmund Morris invented a character (himself) in his Ronald Reagan biography, “Dutch,” and Truman Capote concocted a comforting last scene for “In Cold Blood.” D’Agata and Fingal contribute to the discussion with the format of their book, in which they argue their positions in alternating typefaces. Although D’Agata’s essay can get lost amid the commentary, it’s fascinating for anyone (at least anyone who works in a newsroom) to watch a fraught back-and-forth about the number of strip clubs in Las Vegas evolve into a treatise about the nature of reality. Justin Moyer, The Washington Post
Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis by Alice Kaplan (University of Chicago)
Few students are so naive as to think they can live abroad and not be changed by the experience. In “Dreaming in French,” Alice Kaplan persuasively argues that the time spent in Paris by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, and altered the course of their lives.
Bouvier solidified her love of all things French in the postwar City of Light; the effects became manifest in many ways, including her much-admired fashion sense and her work as a book editor. She was welcomed by the French as practically one of their own during her visit as first lady.
In the late 1950s, Sontag left behind her academic work, not to mention her husband and son, to live a less conventional life that influenced her as a writer. In Paris, she was free to embrace “the bohemian circles that … excited her artistic and sexual imagination.”
Davis’ stay in Paris in the early ’60s brought her into contact with a different kind of race relations than she was used to in her hometown of Birmingham, Ala. Years later, the professor became a cause celebre in France while she was on trial for murder in the United States after guns she owned were used in a courthouse hostage-taking that ended in a shootout (she was ultimately acquitted).
Kaplan admirably lets the three women often speak for themselves, through interviews, diaries or autobiography. The portions on Bouvier are the most fun and easiest to read, whereas the sections on Sontag and Davis tend to bog down in heady literary and philosophical theory. Besides profiling her three subjects, Kaplan serves up a compelling biography of Paris itself. She has done her part to affirm the value of studying abroad, and to that these women would say “oui.” Becky Krystal, TheWashington Post
