Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel
John Hollowell
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
190 pp. $11.95
The Mythopoelc Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh
Urbana: University of Illinois Press
262 pp. $10.00
During the sixties the principal excitement in American trade publishing was caused by a kind of flossily novelized and often brilliantly entertaining journalism—not a term of condescension here—which yielded up some books we can still remember. The term favored for the species is the nonfiction novel, which Truman Capote used for his own early In Cold Blood. By most accounts the phenomenon has pretty well faded away, perhaps completely; unless one groups Ragtime and Roots with them. Not so, however, with the number of academic theoreticians for these books. They multiply like a gathering cavalry of hunters, forcing a reconsideration of the nonfiction novel.
Hollowell’s and Zavarzadeh’s books show that the academic hunters are in full cry. They believe they have caught the scent here of the salvation of the chronically moribund social realist novel. They perceive the nonfiction novel as a great (and scientific) leap forward toward true realism, linking it to the “phenomenological” Nouvelle Vague, Robbe-Grillet, “zero degree of interpretration,” and so on. This display of lineage is to dignify both intellectually and artistically a group of books which were once the spectacular blooms of our commercial establishment but which, because of their origin, might well be dismissed as unrealistic, exploitative shlock. However, one very unfortunate result of the “phenomenological” defense put up by the apologists is a gleefully technological-sounding prose that emits something much like the electronic halitosis of CB radio. This is a question of taste, to be sure, since many become excited by what putsothers off. CB radio, in fact, has its own considerable romance of power and participation in reality which is not unlike that of the nonfiction novel.
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