narrative nonfiction WHAT

[boxofdelights]

I'm reading, or considering reading, a book called The Wild Trees, by Richard Preston. In an AUTHOR'S NOTE, Preston says,

This book is narrative nonfiction. The characters are real and the events are factual, told to the best of my understanding. Passages in which I narrate a person's thoughts and feelings and present dialogue have been built from interviews with the subjects and witnesses, and have been fact-checked. So many incredible things happen in our world that are never noticed, so many stories never get told. My goal is to reveal people and realms that nobody had ever imagined.

Okay. A note about not revealing the exact location of rare plants. Three maps: the California coast and a bit of Australia. This is appealing. Then the narrative begins. October 1987. A baby-blue Honda Civic. The Oregon Coast Highway. A solid-looking young man gets out of the car. We get his description, his name, his college, his major. "He walked off to the side of the parking lot and unzipped his fly. There was a splashing sound."

...What? Is it important that Marwood stopped to urinate? And if you decide to mention it, why would you describe it so coyly?

Two more young men get out of the car. We get their descriptions, their names, their colleges. They are brothers. "Scott handed the binoculars to his younger brother, and their hands touched for an instant. The Sillett brothers' hands had the same appearance -- fine and sensitive-looking, with deft movements."

What. I don't think you are hinting at incest RPF but, seriously, what are you doing?

Boring stuff about the car. Okay! Almost two pages about coast redwoods! More boring stuff about the young men. I start flipping ahead. Really interesting illustrations. Too much text about shaving off eyebrows and having sex in hammocks. Somebody falling out of a tree and dying. Somebody falling out of a tree and being horribly damaged but not dying. All of these details about eyebrows and catheters seem as inconsequential as Marwood's splashing sound or the Sillett brothers' hands. They don't add up to anything. They're just details.

Is this narrative nonfiction a thing now? Is it a thing people like? Is this what nature writing has come to?

Comments

[redbird]

Narrative nonfiction has been a thing at least since John McPhee started writing about everything from oranges to geology. (Someone like rushthatspeaks will now give us both examples from the previous two millennia, but I think that even the most subjective of autobiographies is a different thing.)

It sounds as though Preston not only is trying to get around the problem of not actually knowing what people were thinking (which looms a lot larger in history than in books where he could talk to the subjects), he doesn't realize that not all details are telling. (I'm basing this on your description.)

[wordweaverlynn]

Truman Capote's "nonfiction novel" IN COLD BLOOD is a classic of the genre. Although he leaves out the author/protagonist blow jobs.

[jesse_the_k]

WHAT! I guess I don't really want to know, do I.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

I think it's just Richard Preston. (I kind of hope it is, anyway.) He had a fluke bestseller with The Hot Zone, where I suspect he got a tremendous benefit from having had the New Yorker's editorial staff working on the core of the text; all his subsequent work has been marked by that odd inability to tell the difference between facts that are relevant and interesting to what you'd think would be his core material and facts that are just . . . there. I suspect him of having novelist envy while being a rotten natural novelist, and taking it out with this not-as-functional-as-he-thinks hybrid crap.

It's a shame, because he does pick interesting subjects. If only they were half as interesting once he got finished with them . . .

[boxofdelights]

*snrk!* It's like he's the anti-John McPhee.

[loligo]

When Andy tried selling a book about strange invertebrates and the interesting biological principles they embody, he was told by multiple agents that right now, nearly *all* nonfiction needs to be structured around a human interest narrative. And he and I gnashed our teeth in frustration, because we have seen way too many promising nonfiction books about plants and animals RUINED (in our opinion) by the author nattering on about, say, her spiritual journey, or his drinking spree with scientist X. IF WE WANTED TO READ ABOUT PEOPLE, WE WOULD BUY A BOOK ABOUT PEOPLE.

But that's how things are these days. We were told that an old-fashioned Stephen J Gould style book with essays about actual science would not be marketable.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

I believe you, and it depresses me almost beyond measure. It accounts for what's wrong about every book about medicine or science I've read over the past few years, even the good ones: not only do I want to read about science and not a Human Interest Narrative, but I often have the distinct sense that the writers want to be writing about science, damn it. And not about the biography of every scientist whose name comes up in the course of the discussion.

In other news, there are kids who should get off my lawn. Taking their celebrity culture with them so I don't have to go out there and pick up their trash.

[jesse_the_k]

I believe the new trend is epitomized by "colon books". Their titles all contain at least one.

Blub: the Narrative History of the Tear

Fib: Three Thousand Years of Little Lies

Spinning and Dancing: Why Cicadas are Natural Choreographers

and such.

[ifreet]

It is now a thing, but I suspect you are holding an especially terrible example of the genre.

Perhaps Preston's interviewees could neither confirm nor deny whether Marwood urinated? Some of the car passengers say yes, some say no. All anyone agrees on was the sound - could have been anything, really.

[boxofdelights]

...but, thirty years after the fact, they do remember that their hands touched for an instant.