[issybird]

I finished this late and didn’t feel as if I had much to add to the discussion, but now that I’m reading Fanny and Stella I’ve been thinking about it again. I know this isn’t the time or place for talking about F&S, but reading the two books so close together has me considering what seems to be a prevalence of so-called “narrative nonfiction”. When I look over the nominations for nonfiction month, it seems to me that most of the selections were more or less of this particular subset and it would also include such choices as Beautiful Forevers in the other club. It poses a lot of issues for me.

I was one whose reaction to Swerve was that Greenblatt was entirely too familiar with the workings of Poggio’s mind. Greenblatt clearly knows his stuff and I was entertained by his lively intelligence and broad range, which made for an entertaining read, but ultimately in such a short book, at a scanty 200 pages of text, the proportion of speculation to hard fact did a disservice to the treatment of the discovery and dissemination of a seminal text, which after all was the theme of the book.

Compounding this, Greenblatt tried to have it both ways. I agree that he didn’t specifically claim that Lucretius was single-handedly responsible for the Renaissance. But the title, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, explicitly does make that claim. Ah, marketing! A book the general public could read and feel as if we’re smarter than we really are! And pat ourselves on the back for our taste and acumen. Then of course the Pulitzer and the NBA served to heighten that impression.

Part of this is the issue of the popular historian v. the academic historian. There’s nothing wrong with popular history (David McCullough, for example, some of whose books are better than others, although I’d never read another word from that plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin no matter how well regarded), but I tend to expect more from an academic historian whose credentials are front and center. I think the hybrid, academic historian writing popular history is dangerous, setting up impossible expectations and tending to discourage critical evaluation at least by the reading public and the popular press.

Obviously there’s a continuum regarding just how much narrative is appropriate to a particular nonfiction work and I’d argue that subject matter plays a role. I already plan to revisit these issues with Fanny and Stella, lol. But I’m concurrently reading an also-ran from this month, The Sleepwalkers, and it’s something of a relief to be reading a highly researched and detailed work where inference is based on the facts as presented in the text and clearly labeled as such.