The New ‘New Republic’

March 24, 2007

Guest Post by Morbo

I realize not everyone is a fan of “The New Republic.” Personally, I find it sometimes enlightening and sometimes exasperating. For a journal of political and cultural thought, that’s not a bad place to be.

Recently, TNR was bought by a CanWest, a Canadian media conglomerate that leans right. There are rumors that CanWest has told TNR’s staff that the magazine must become profitable within three years.

Fat chance. Policy magazines are usually subsidized and run in the red. If CanWest is serious, my guess is we’ll see the end of TNR within a few years.

For the time being, TNR’s new owners have beefed up the page count, launched a redesign and upgraded the paper quality. Before the magazine is bled dry, I urge you to check out two articles in the March 19 issue.

One is Andrew Sullivan’s review of Dinesh D’Souza’s repulsive book “The Enemy At Home.” Understand that I’m not always a Sullivan fan. But even when I disagree with him, I can’t help but admire Sullivan’s writing style. When he’s on, he’s really on. His review of D’Souza’s vomit-in-print is the best smack down I’ve seen of that unfortunate tome. Sullivan’s style is clear-eyed, calm and utterly devastating to D’Souza’s thesis. Take a look.

Also worth a read is Alex Heard’s piece on humorist David Sedaris. I concede that Sedaris is a very good writer, but every time I read something by him, I get the nagging feeling it’s at least semi-fictional. How could anyone’s life be this zany? How is it that everyone in Sedaris’ family and every person he has ever met is this colorful and full of quips?

Heard does some digging and proves that Sedaris’ books and articles, although marketed as non-fiction, contain made-up incidents, characters and quotes. (Unfortunately, Heard’s piece is behind TNR’s subscription wall.) Sedaris admits this to Heard.

Here’s what’s shocking: No one seems to think this matters.

Writing in The Washington Post, Peter Carlson ridicules Heard as some kind of rube. Carlson insists that other humor writers have invented tales and exaggerated over the years. He lists Mark Twain, James Thurber and Bill Cosby among them. Carlson calls Heard’s article “ridiculous.”

I’m not aware that Twain, Thurber or Cosby marketed their stories as non-fiction. While what they wrote might have been based on some real people, everyone knew they were slinging tales.

It’s different with Sedaris. He claims what he writes is non-fiction. It described that way by his publishers – yet it contains quotes people never actually said, incidents that never occurred and people who never existed. This is OK with Carlson because it’s humor writing.

I’ve long suspected this about The Post’s standards – that it’s perfectly acceptable to make up stuff for the sake of a better story. It’s good to see someone confirm it in print.

But pardon me for being from the old school. When I see quotes around a comment in an article portrayed as non-fiction, even in a humor piece, I assume someone actually said that. When I see incidents described in these articles, I assume they occurred. When characters are described in detail, I assume such people exist or once did. That’s what I was taught when I studied journalism. The rules don’t change for articles and columns simply because they are written to make readers laugh. This stuff either happened, or it did not. If the former, it’s legitimate journalism; if the latter, it’s something else.

An active imagination is fine. If you want to make up wacky characters and outrageous situations, there is a genre that allows for that. It’s call “fiction.”

(By the way, Heard once wrote a hugely entertaining book about people with weird beliefs about the end of the world. It’s called “Apocalypse Pretty Soon,” and I assume none of it is made up. It’s worth a look.)

Huh? You are comparing apples and oranges here. Where exactly do you see evidence to support this comment – “I’ve long suspected this about The Post’s standards – that it’s perfectly acceptable to make up stuff for the sake of a better story. It’s good to see someone confirm it in print.”

Carlson is saying that it’s not a big deal if a few details in Sedaris’s work are exaggerations or invented. I would agree. Sedaris is a humorist, not a journalist. Carlson is not saying he holds the Post to the same standards that he holds Sedaris. They publish quite different types of work.

  • I’ve never read Sedaris. I’m only familiar with him from NPR. He can be ridiculously funny, but it always seemed obvious that he was inventing most of the details of his stories. Why his stuff would be labeled non-fiction is beyond me. Maybe essays, fictitious or not, automatically get labeled as non-fiction? I don’t know. To listen to Sedaris and assume he’s reporting facts, is as silly as labeling his stuff non-fiction.

    Here’s YouTube of Sedaris on Letterman. Funny stuff.

  • I guess I haven’t been paying attention; I didn’t realize Sedaris was claiming his material was non-fiction. It’s clearly not. (I have a friend who used to live in the neighborhood where Sedaris grew up; she thinks his mom gets quite a raw deal in his books.) Is this important? I don’t know.

  • Have you read Esquire’s review of The Enemy at Home? In the first lines, the reviewer challenges D’Souza to a fist fight. It only gets better from there.

  • “I’m not aware…” Obviously.

    Try “old school” and dig. You’ll even find an actual occurance of some sanctimonious twit accusing Twain of exaggeration. His retort is a classic.

    Seems to me that every humorist columnist that I can think of writes in the first person – life in Florida is weird, but do you think that Dave Barry never exaggerates? Or that Gumpaw really chase the bear? Who knows, maybe Chili Dawgs really do bark at night…

    All this bitching from someone who writes under the name Morbo. Must be a weird sexual insecurity thing about openly gay whiny humorists…

    -jjf

  • The New Republic(an) has improved the quality of its paper? Buy now in bulk and store it for the coming toilet paper shortage!!

    As to the Washington Post – further proof it isn’t even good litter box liner anymore. Had these bozos been there in 1972, Nixon would still be President-for-Life.

  • And stop linking to their subscription-only website. I don’t care who wrote what, I won’t give these semiliterate typists a fucking dime.

  • my guess is we’ll see the end of TNR within a few years.

    Oh, the humanity!

    Will this tragic demise mean we no longer will be blessed with the great loads of, um, pearls dropping from the, um, mind of Marty Peretz?* Double-oh the humanity!

    *As if anyone else is going to publish him

  • Just to be clear: This is not about a few exaggerations. Sedaris makes things up and sells it to the public as non-fiction. He and his publishers do this because material marketed as memoirs –things that really happened — sells better than fiction.

    Here is an example from Heard’s article. Read it and see if you think it qualifies as a mere exaggeration: In one piece, Sedaris wrote about how, as a youngster, he took guitar lessons from a man who was a little person. Sedaris writes that his flamboyant behavior offended the instructor, who somehow got the impression that Sedaris was coming on to him. The interplay between Sedaris and the instructor and the sexual misunderstanding is the heart of the story — but it never happened.

    Sedaris did briefly take guitar lessons from a little person. Everything else is made up — the sexual misunderstanding was made up, the dialogue was made up, even the name of the instructor was changed. This story was marketed as non-fiction. This is not allowable exaggeration; it is a type of fraud.

    Years ago, I read a piece by Stephen Glass in Harper’s recounting his adventures working as a telephone psychic. It was funny and entertaining. At the time, I suspected it was not true and even checked to see if it was in the fiction section of the magazine. It wasn’t. Sure enough, we later found out that nothing Glass wrote was true. But Glass once owned a telephone, and the story was funny — so no harm done, right?

  • In our town library, only novels and short story collections get labelled as “fiction”. Everything else — including books of humour, memoirs, etc which are often full of obviously “tall stories” (fictional) are in the non-fiction section. I think it’s something to do with Dewey decimal system.

  • “Just to be clear…” Morbo, deal with it. Every year or two Dave Barry used to write a column about ‘grammer’, and every time he would get incensed letters from folks who simply didn’t get the joke. Is the fact that he wrote the satire in first person in a column make him deceptive?

    Look at Bill Bryson. His travel writing is, in the opinion of many, very funny. But while the places and experiences are real, he engages in some flights of fancy. For example, his mother is an extremely bright, witty, and lucid person. And his father was one of the finest sports writers in the country. Compare this to the portrayal of them in, say, THE LOST CONTINENT. The astute reader will intuitively understand that never, ever, on a family vacation, did his father depart to see a collection of civil war rectal thermometers while he personally watched three generations of flies be born, his brother lost conciousness, and his mother kept offering sandwhiches.

    Yes, there are some people who will miss the point that he is employing satire and exaggeration for humor. For example, many adults with PDD type disorders are inherently literalists and have great difficulty recognizing such literary mechanisms. And, of course, the DSM shows us that these are spectral traits. So, for any given ‘joke’ some people just won’t get it.

    Then we find another variation in human behavior, those who can laugh at themselves (a standing joke at our home is that, while my anal retentive attention to detail helped me catch many details that most people miss (example, Twin Pines Mall becomes Lone Pine Mall), I missed the blatant reference to Chuck Barry while watching BACK TO THE FUTURE at movie theatres – embarrassing, but funny, I must have had a brain fart). Others, well, they feel cheated and get mad – see one of Barry’s ode to such people for my response.

    -jjf

  • Ummmmmm. . . . . Mark Twain’s travel books were marketed as nonfiction — Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, Following the Equator, etc. But anybody who has read any of these books realizes that not every incident in them could possibly have happened.

  • Look up “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” on Amazon and you’ll see it listed under a variety of humor listings and “Fiction & Literature”. Not under any non-fiction heading. I can confirm finding it in the fiction section at my local library. Other books of his show up under biography and humor, generally. Certainly his books are strongly autobiographical, but clearly fictionalized. As others have observed, many of Mark Twain’s books were framed that way too. It would only be dishonest if he said they weren’t fictionalized. I don’t know that the publisher is being that specific in their marketing.

  • Sullivan’s takedown of D’Shitbag is superb. I often find the guy infuriating, but he’s legit as both a thinker and a writer, and he gets this one exactly correct: D’Shitbag will ride any horse that gets him to the destination of total social control. He sees the clear parallels and common mindsets of bin Laden and bin Dobson–and Sullivan masterfully calls him on it.

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