• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 955 0

the alert for falsification and in a mood to equate it with deception rather than with the art of fiction. Mezrich had conflated some characters, fabricated others, and invented some significant details in the story. “Every word on the page isn’t supposed to be fact-checkable,” he told an interviewer. “The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it’s true.”26 But Mezrich’s book was published with a disclaimer explaining that the names, locations, and other details had been changed and that some characters were composites. As the Boston Globe reporter noted, though, the disclaimer was “in fine print, on the copyright page” and might readily have been missed by readers. Other editors and nonfiction authors, when consulted, expressed skepticism about Mezrich’s techniques: “It’s lying,” said Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm. “Nonfiction is reporting the world as it is, and when you combine characters and change chronology, that’s not the world as it is.”27 Gay Talese, often regarded as one of the inventors of the modern nonfiction genre, was similarly emphatic: taking liberties of this kind is “unacceptable” and “dishonest.”28 Mezrich, when asked, invoked the word literary to describe the choices he made: “I took literary license to make it readable.”29

What does literary mean in this connection? Is it a version of the more familiar phrase poetic license? License in such a context has more to do with giving, or taking, permission than with legal sanction.

A few years later, Mezrich was back with a new book, The Accidental Billionaires, subtitled The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, in which the boundaries of fact and fiction were unapologetically, indeed triumphantly, blurred. As with James Frey, who transformed himself from faux memoirist to fiction writer (and profited by the exchange), so Ben Mezrich declared that he would capitalize on what had been perceived as a transgression of the rules: “I see myself as attempting to break ground. I definitely am trying to create my own genre here,” he told an interviewer. “I’m attempting to tell stories in a very new and entertaining way. I see myself as an entertainer.”30 A bookstore owner noted that copies originally piled on a table for new nonfiction, would later be relocated to the business section. Mezrich’s book included imagined and re-created scenes, some in the “he might have” mode that has become popular in certain kinds of biography. One review, dryly adopting the book’s style of unabashed psychological guesswork, began, “Though we cannot know exactly what went through Ben Mezrich’s mind as he wrote The Accidental Billionaires, his nonfictionish book about the creation of Facebook, we can perhaps speculate hypothetically about what it possibly might have been like.”31 The film version, called The Social Network, told the story of Facebook’s founding through the accounts of several characters, never indicating which of them was “true.”

Biofeedback

If memoirs often tend to veer in the direction of self-fictionalizing, the venerable practice of biography, literally “life writing,” would seem to depend to a certain extent on telling the truth. Thus, biography is often poised somewhere between the categories of literature and history. While in many ways this would seem to increase the prestige of biography as a genre, since these days history is a less suspect, more rational and evidence-based category than literature, it has made for a slightly anomalous role for the modern practitioner of this ancient craft.

Biography, it seems, has been suffering from an inferiority complex of sorts even as its practitioners triumph in the bookstores. The founding of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York was described by its faculty director, David Nasaw, himself a distinguished biographer (Andrew Carnegie; William Randolph Hearst), as a way of changing the perception of biography as “the stepchild of the academy.”32 The editor of The American Historical Review commented