• Title: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
• By: Katherine Boo
• Date: 02.07.2012
• Page #: 288

“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”

― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations 

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I.

Mumbai is Janus-faced. It is a city that Aravind Adiga describes in The White Tiger (a novel that I read not too long ago) as “two Indias”—a place that is structurally and socially antipodal, to which most of Adiga’s impecunious characters emerge from “the Darkness.” Likewise, in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which won the National Book Award three weeks ago, the players—her sources of information—live in the dark side, in an undercity, “a sodden, snake-filled bit of brushland” called the Annawadi, a word whose etymology is shaped by its relationships, ambition, and fortitude; connotations that are implied in the tagline on an advertisement for Italian tiles that reads “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.” The wall on which the ad appears creates an ironic bifurcation between Annawadi and the glamorous, towering gaudy hotels of the other Mumbai—the overcity. Contradictions like this are littered across the landscape and throughout the book. Indeed, even Boo, who is at once a reporter and storyteller, recognizes the paradoxical divide as something that doesn’t require her own creative and authorial influence; that she doesn’t have to augment the reality when it comes to writing about the impoverished. For Boo is an ardent believer that “statistics about the poor sometimes have a tenuous relationship to lived experience,” as she writes at the end of the book, adding, “I just believe that better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives.”

II.

To anyone who is familiar with Boo’s journalism, particularly during her stints at the Washington City Paper, the Washington Monthly, and the Washington Post (in that order), the dispatches she penned are often themetized around the city’s underclass: deprived single mothers, drug suppliers, disfranchised asylum denizens—“archetypes” whose situations were less misunderstood than unknown. In “The Marriage Cure,” for example, which appeared on the New Yorker in 2003, Boo, at an Oklahoma housing project, follows two women enrolled in a federally funded initiative to promote marriage among the poor after a group of academics and policy-type personnel had suggested that rampant bachelorhood in poor neighborhoods is most likely a root cause for poverty.

Boo, however, perhaps after recognizing a potential banality, decided not to write about the proposal itself or allowed it to dictate her narrative around (she didn’t interview a bunch of opinionated people and lawmakers nor had she singled out a subject and zoomed in close.) Instead, she wrote about female friendship. The piece starts like this:

One July morning last year in Oklahoma City, in a public housing project named Sooner Haven, twenty-two-year-old Kim Henderson pulled a pair of low-rider jeans over a high-rising gold lamé thong and declared herself ready for church. Her best friend in the project, Corean Brothers, was already in the parking lot, fanning away her hot flashes behind the wheel of a smoke-belching Dodge Shadow. “Car’s raggedy, but it’ll get us from pillar to post,” Corean said when Kim climbed in…

It’s quite telling that Boo sees the meaningfulness of stories concerning human relationships (an aspect that is quite evident in the Behind the Beautiful Forevers.) She writes about Kim and Corean and the people in their lives as if she has known them for ages, and has only now, finally, gotten around to writing about them. Not to mention the fact that both characters seem to converse and banter with each other with easy abandon (as though no one is there listening.) Thus, not only that we, the readers, get intimately close to the article’s central characters, but also acknowledge the state of disillusionment that many of the single women living in the projects have toward the male sex; we learn that most of them had grown up without fathers, or been left or beaten (Kim and Corean, for one, had lived with violent criminals.) Boo writes, “Relationships with men were often what stopped an ambitious woman from escaping.” (Translation: it’s complicated.)

And yet, the piece seldom alights explicitly to one side or the other. That’s a sign of Boo’s clear-headed ambition: She tells the story with no identifiable motive other than to make the story known. “One unacknowledged consolation of struggling in the inner city is the lack of time one has to indulge romantic discontent,” Boo writes.

“The Marriage Cure” garnered Boo the “Best Feature Magazine Writing” award by the American Society of Magazine Editors back in 2004.

III.

According to the interview posted on the book’s official website and the Guardian book review penned by Amit Chaudhuri, Boo arrived in Annawadi in November 2007 when she was sightseeing Mumbai with a government official and a social worker who were transporting her from one location to another. At each stop, groups of women had been assembled to attest to the utility of government-run social programs. Last on this arranged tour was Annawadi, where Boo surveyed the crowd and noticed one woman, in particular, clearly uninterested in the proceedings: She saw Asha, one of the book’s central characters, utterly detached, as though she was privately securitizing the absurdity of if all, while standing next to a beautiful, younger woman—her daughter, Manju. Boo was immediately struck by the pair and “sensed there was another story there.”

For the next three and a half years, Boo reported in Annawadi. She lingered, from the early hours of day until the lateness of night, mostly around the Annawadians, conversing with them, listening intently to their pleas and chitchats, taking notes and pictures, making audio and video recordings, etc. In the epilogue, Boo writes that she and her translator, Unnati Tripathi, constantly, “wrestled with the question of whether days in rat-filled Annawadi garbage sheds and late-night expeditions with thieves at a glamorous new airport had anything to contribute to an understanding of the pursuit of opportunity in an unequal, globalized world.” And as direct upshot from this moral ambivalence, we witness Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ most brilliant feat: Its suppression of theatrics, a writing that is neither cold nor judgmentally penetrating. “…a vivid account of a self-contained but fragile universe tossed about by the storms of the outside world,” writes Karan Mahjan for the Wall Street Journal, as well as “pure, astonishing reportage with as un-biased a lens as possible trained on specific individuals,” courtesy of Christian Science Monitor’s Terry Hong.

IV.

In the same vein of Charles Dickens’s tomes—the inventor of the social realist narrative—Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a story about corruption (with a capital C) and poverty. And like Dickens, Boo is searchingly particular in her themes. By studying a single slum and focusing on a single group of people over an extended period of time, she is able to bring the world of the extremely poor to life with a sharp distinctness and insight. This monomaniacal focus also imparts Boo the opportunity to depict the capriciousness and frequent corruption of the legal system–bribes are demanded and exchanged everywhere –but also its random victories, as a lawyer (on whom the family spends all its savings) manages to get an acquittal from a less than careful judge. Meanwhile Abdul, the young collector of scrap who is in many aspects the Pip in Boo’s story, is interned in a juvenile detention center, grim but not awful, where he encounters a moralistic guru who inspires him to become a better person. “I’m just becoming dirty water, like everyone else. I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is”.

Boo’s other central narrative concerns is Manju, a bright and intrepid young woman who runs a private school teaching children to read, and at the same time studies for her BA in literature in a second-rate “college.” Meanwhile, her mother, Asha, is a kindergarten teacher in a government school who seldom shows up for class, rather spending the majority of her time serving in a female-reserved seat in the panchayat (local council), where she becomes a minor functionary of the Hindu extremist party Shiv Sena, as well as mistress of a series of politicians and businessmen. This narrative line gives Boo an opportunity to expose the hideous corruption of government schools and the ridiculous rote learning that is the prevailing norm in both slum schools and colleges. As the book ends, Asha becomes the organizer of a fake charity that takes government education money under false pretenses, and Manju signs up as one of its non-teaching teachers, closing the little school where she has actually done some real teaching.

It’s quite remarkable how Boo manages to lace those narratives together without sensational embellishment (i.e. the underlying allure of “poverty tourism.”) If this emotional understatement feels self-aware is because it is. When Boo went to New Orleans to cover Katrina’s aftermath for The New Yorker, a woman working at an evacuation center accosted Boo and told her, “Wait, so you take our stories and put them in a magazine that rich people read, and you get paid and we don’t? That’s some backward-ass bluffiness, if you ask me.” Boo, just like any conscientious journalist, has always recognized this plot-hole—“the moral dilemma that reporting on poverty raises.” Her solution is surprisingly simple: to always emphasize the basic goal of journalism—to trust in the inherit value of the story—as she passionately attests in her interview with Emily Brennan at Guernica:

We take stories and purvey them to people with money. And in the conventions of my profession, which I try to adhere to, we can’t pay people for stories . . . But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world. Because if you take a kid like Sunil, who’s been denied the possibility of an education that allows him to write his own story, and all of the people who lack the means and access to do so, they go down the memory hole. They’re lost. What it comes down to is, the only thing worse than being a poverty reporter is if no one ever wrote about it at all. My work, I hope, helps people understand how much gets lost between the intellection of how to get people out of poverty and how it’s actually experienced (Text bolded for emphasis.)

And in Annawadi, the experience is convoluted, thanks to the abhorrent duality of poverty and corruption, in which almost every single commodity or privilege falls under the law of the free market, the “if you want it, you have to pay for it” principle. Water? There are six public water faucets, but a Shiv Sena gang has appropriated them and charges usage fees. An education? The free municipal school near the airport stops at the eighth grade, and the teachers are often absent anyway; if you want to attend the ninth grade, you have to pay for a private school. A new heart valve? The public hospitals are supposed to perform these kinds of operations for very little money, but the heart surgeon at Sion Hospital thinks it’s worth 60,000 rupees. If this sounds like perverse economic Darwinism, that’s because it is. The anti-poverty agendas, for one, appear to be failures—the benefits are basically auctioned off to the highest bidder. For instance, Asha and some of her friends benefited from a program that “was supposed to encourage financially vulnerable women to pool their savings and make low-interest loans to one another in times of need. But Asha’s support group preferred to lend the pooled money at high interest to poorer women whom they’d excluded from the collective.” Religious charities don’t fare much better either. Sister Paulette, who runs the Catholic orphanage, routinely sells expired food donated by airline-catering companies to poor people in Annawadi, who in turn try to resell it in order to derive a small profit.

(No wonder the Indian economy grew at such a stupendous rate!)

V.

Theoretically, there are two kinds of poverty literature available for the masses to gorge on: problems narratives and solutions narratives. Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers undeniably belongs in the “problems” section where solutions are not quite readily campaigned or formulated. Still, it would be a naive mistake to casually read it as a book about what causes poverty or social ruin; rather it is a book about poverty and social ruin. Boo wants to know, and to convey, how poverty is lived. She uses almost no statistics, lists, or categorizations. The history of Mumbai is barely sketched at all (perhaps this is the book’s most damaging flaw because by omitting history, Boo’s narrative does not permit us even to ask what part of this misery might possibly be the effect of recent market liberalization and what part, by contrast, has been there for a very long time.) And through the course of the book, Boo rarely makes personal judgments about her character, which is characteristic of her. Years ago, she produced a distinguished narrative journalism at The Washington Post, where she masterfully described the insufferable conditions in the capital’s group homes for the mentally ill. But in that series, statistics tend to mix with observation and reportage, and history and politics and social policy tend to play a role in the story, which means the tools of journalism, no matter how faintly they appear to the reader, are continuously out in the open, as though Boo is tacitly emphasizing to that she is writing a news article. The great American exception to these trends was most likely James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which might be the closest comparison to what Boo is attempting here (although Agee inserted himself into the book and showed an interest in classification.)

“She has captured the spirit of colloquial Hindustani and Marathi without using an idiosyncratic idiom, and deftly negotiated distinctions of caste, class and religion,” wrote an Indian reviewer. “I am used to hearing false notes in depictions of Mumbai life; when they occur repeatedly, they undermine the authorial voice. The 250 plus pages of Behind the Beautiful Forevers contain no false notes.” Wherein one Indian interviewer, Anjali Puri, wrote, “All manner of ‘India specialists’—journalists, sociologists, poverty-theorists, middle-class anti-corruption crusaders—may find themselves feeling inadequate by the time they have reached the end of” Boo’s book.

In other words, Boo’s crucial strength as a reporter resides in her empathetic imagination. Her book has the closely observed and artfully constructed quality of high fiction and art film (Satyajit Ray, anyone?) She wrote many scenes with Dickensian focus as much as showing genuine interest in her characters, without contradictions, without equivocations. It ultimately doesn’t matter that Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a “problem” book, for its success as a meticulous work of journalism is that it reads like a novel without sacrificing its truthfulness.

• Title: Travels in Siberia
• By: Ian Frazier
• Date: 09.27.2011 (first published on October 2010)
• Page #: 560

“There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

// // //

The first sentence in Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia begins thusly:

“Officially, there is no such place as Siberia.”

It is a confident sentence, but the adverb “officially” ascribes the assertion (i.e. the existence of Siberia) to someone or to some power besides the writer himself. It also implies a geographical limitation, something that metaphysically exist in one’s mind and heart but hasn’t yet virtually realized or achieved massive recognition (i.e. officially, there is no such place as Palestine or the Midwest.) This admission of authority, however, should not be mistaken as an intimation of defeat, but rather as a humble acceptance of challenge. Because this is what Mr. Frazier ultimately goes to do in a span of 500-plus pages: He’s equally trying to conjure Siberia’s existence in the map as well as demystifying his seemingly irrational adoration for the region. Evidently, It’s an arduous task both on his body and intellects, but as a chronicler of America’s The Great Plains (see: On The Rez), Frazier has all the credentials (and certainly the bragging rights) to pull if off. And he does pull it off. Exceedingly.

Within a span of two chapters, an astute reader is more likely to determine that Travels in Siberia doesn’t quite read like a travelogue or a compendium of cultural Russia despite possessing the added advantages of such accounts. And Frazier certainly makes this clear from the beginning when he declares his inexplicable love toward Russia—a “dread Russia love,” to which American Midwesterners like Frazier seem especially susceptible. And, indeed, Frazier cannot rationally explain the hold Russia exerts on him. It’s “an independent force out there in the ether of ideas”. This mysterious affection catapults him on an epic journey by van across the whole of Siberia in the summer of 2001, when one evening he takes on a 9,000-mile journey from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, accompanied with his two guides, Sergei and Volodya, aboard an unreliable Renault van that occasionally catches on fire.

As Russell Scott Valentino of the Iowa Review notes, Travels in Siberia is “not an academic book,” because, unlike most academic books, Frazier is not only attempting to communicate with the reader at an intellectual level but also at an emotional one, particularly his “magical, enchanted fascination” with Russia and his unsparing details of its shortcomings as an American observer. It is a rather a curious inversion of journalistic writing, considering such level of subjectivity immediately places Frazier in a vulnerable position. But Valentino, who he himself traversed Russia extensively in 1987, quickly dismisses any sense of suspicion the reader may have against Frazier’s frank judgment about Russia and the Russians:

I recognize a deeper truth in what appears to be just a subtly descriptive aside, one of many such truthful moments: a sense of responsibility in his treatment of the subject, which I can’t help thinking comes from the respect accorded by those around him for what he’s doing, writing about them and their home.

And in order to write about them with academic integrity and fairness, Frazier, perhaps through a subconscious attempt to somberly demystify Russia for himself, delves deep into the history of Siberia through war records and variety of literature. In fact, it is safe to say that Frazier’s book is as much about books he has read as it is about his journey; he loves books about Russia and Siberia as much as he loves the place itself. And through keen digressions that enlightens rather than muddles, Frazier revives many writers whom had paved the way on their previous travels, like John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, and George Kennan, an American explorer of Siberia in the 19th century who reminds the reader of Frazier himself. Great figures of the past, too, are vibrantly rendered as those Frazier meets face to face. Genghis Kahn, the legendary Mongol overlord, fascinates Frazier in particular. There many others: Mikhail Bakunin, a colorful revolutionary, who succeeded in escaping Siberia prisons in the mid-1800s, The Tsars, the Decembrists—all of them tromp through the pages of Frazier prose like the anthropomorphized broomsticks in Disney’s Fantasia.

All of this tribute is inadvertently telling of the nonfiction genre’s capability to reconstruct stories. And in Frazier’s case, the reconstruction is ultimately redemptive—to him and to Russia’s origins. Indeed, Frazier seems more occupied in exploring Siberia’s past than musing over its future. For one, he scarcely riffles through economy texts to study Russia’s crucial role in gas and oil exploration, which is gradually making it the prime source of its wealth (according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Russia tops the world largest gas and crude oil producers list.) Perhaps this veneration of the past is a tactic in balancing his American sensibility that repulses at the sight of Siberian bathrooms—“I’ve noticed that in books by Siberian travelers of the past they don’t talk about bathrooms, and that’s probably good. I reluctantly break with this tradition for two reasons. First, I am an American, and Americans pay attention to and care about bathrooms”—or perhaps this is Frazier implicitly admitting that Siberia’s historical richness and fascinatingly dark metaphors are enough to sustain his personal examination from invidious scrutiny. What is certain, however, is Frazier’s observational keenness that remains undiminished throughout even when it tips into comedic candor (it helps that Frazier employs his signature, self-deprecating humor with endearing regularity in his narrative, especially his irritated testimonies of his linguistic failures with the Russian language and his struggles to communicate efficiently.)

But if there’s one area where Frazier is totally open with his emotions, it has to be his focus—or even obsession—on the extensive history of Siberian exiles, an account that imparts a lingering melancholy to a largely gleeful book. It is Travels in Siberia’s most inviting investigation. The manner in which the book transmits the minute details of these exiles not only seems to lend a valedictory respect to their lives but also a sympathetic exposure to their hardships. While Frazier repeatedly marries Siberia’s mystery and vastness to that of America’s, the Siberian “road,” in contrast, conjures to mind not the positive impressions of freedom and possibility and reinvention of self, but rather punishment, imprisonment and “the deep and ancient sorrow of exile.” He cannot abstain from condemning the Siberian gulag and the atrocities committed there. “Using a place as punishment may or may not be fair to the people who are punished there, but it always demeans and does a disservice to the place,” he writes. Later, after a long drive across the frozen wastes of Lake Baikal, Frazier arrived at a long-abandoned prison camp near the town of Topolinoe, which, against Sergei’s persuasion to avoid it, he comments on the pall of unmentionableness that coats the place in the midst of thicketed woods:

What struck me then and still strikes me now was the place’s overwhelming aura of absence . . . The deserted prison camp just sat there—unexcused, un-torn down, unexplained. During its years of operation it had been a secret, and in some sense it still was. Horrors had happened here, and/or miseries and sufferings and humiliations short of true horrors. ‘No comment,’ the site seemed to say.

But this is also Frazier’s attempt to also say that “the limitless periods of suffering” experienced by the countless millions who trudged their way into Siberia seems to be a part of the very soul of the Russian people—that it comes with the territory. It is quite a twist to a narrative that began with an odd love story; though one might argue that is precisely what makes Frazier’s love so real—that he has fallen in love with an unreliable lover who possesses the capacity to enchant as much as to betray. And how fittingly elegiac that Frazier finds himself at the end of his long summer journey across Siberia at the Pacific Ocean, having crossed the Sikhote-Alin mountains, with what could have constituted a perfect ending; there, when he and his companions merrily swim in the ocean, having made it across Siberia, as he shares a brutal reflection, “Today was Tuesday, September 11, 2001.” Quite a few nonfiction authors are given such a rare opportunity; alas, Frazier rejects the gift and refocuses the narrative back to Russia for another arguably less rewarding 140+ pages.

Still, Frazier seems to want to defy the illusionary effects of time by carving out a physical place in Siberia for those who never had the chance to preserve their lives in literature. “Just as the twentieth century split the atom, it took apart the human soul; in the camps of the Siberian gulag the soul’s reduction approached the absolute,” Frazier writers. “Writers… who might have described the horrors did not survive to do so. Among those who did survive, the experience usually depleted the residue of hope in them to a level where they didn’t have much left to write with.” But Frazier clings to that hope. And so he keeps on writing. On telling stories with benign judgments that honors humanity in large. Its successes and failures.

• Title: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
• By: Joan Didion
• Date: 10.28.2008 (first published in 1968)
• Page #: 256

“Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide.”

Virginia Woolf — “Modern Novels”

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It’s universally acknowledged that the art of essay writing began with Michel de Montaigne in 1571. A short, thickset Gascon nobleman, Montaigne, after he had retired from public life at the age of 38, incarcerated himself in his château on the last day of February of the same year, at the third floor of a cylindrical tower—“the most useless place in the house”—where he kept a library of more than one thousand books. He was planning to write (or rather attempt to write) about the myriad thoughts, philosophies, and events that had occupied his mind up to that point—the morbid intent of which was “to teach us not to be afraid to die”.

Several centuries later, it’s remarkable how the essay itself, as a literary genre, has remained steadfast in its calling with barely minor modifications. No matter what the topic is, good essays are still distinguished by the writer’s constructive skepticism and intellectual reflection—of asserting her existence in the world—which may often seem to the innocent reader, and rightfully so, self-indulgent and myopic, as much as they are, inevitably, boldly illuminating, unafraid to declare, “I am myself the matter of what I write.”

We can discern this self-referentialist echo from the many essay and nonfiction volumes penned by Joan Didion, a modernist “reporter” and essayist whose first collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, bestowed her at post-publication with critical praise and literary notoriety for her lack of “empathy” and “human curiosity.”

“I’m not very interested in people,” she told Boris Kachka of New York magazine last year, when her latest essay collection, Blue Nights, was set for release the next month. “I recognize it in myself—there is a basic indifference toward people.”

But there’s a key word in that seemingly wounded confession, isn’t it? That her apathy is essentially “basic”? Because if there’s an undeniable characteristic about Slouching Towards Bethlehem is that it is “surpassingly eclectic” and populated for its size. Written within a span of six years against deadline and for money, for Vogue and Saturday Evening Post, some of Didion’s essays are incisively brief and personal while others are themetized around the social upheavals of the ’60s in California (there is, among others, “an essay on a famous murder, a movie-star profile, several travel pieces, a meditation on the wedding industry, and a description of the emotional complexities that attend a grown woman’s visit to her parents’ home.“)

When it comes to the latter, Didion is occasionally misunderstood for an inveterate social conservative, partially because of her unflattering reportage of the Haight-Ashbury district in the summer of ’67—the title essay in the volume, where her invectives oscillate between lament and nostalgia:

At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing it ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

To my understanding, and based on that essay alone, to denounce Didion as a sentimental traditionalist is a naive attempt to misread her. Indeed, as she writes in the preface of her collection, she cringes at her own inability to capture the kernel of the summer of love in that essay while also bemoaning her critics and their invidious remarks:

I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point.

To which I ask: Isn’t rumination an essential tool to the essayist? Isn’t within Didion’s purview to regularly reflect, perhaps worry about something is lost, and ponder whether the younger generation, whose  rebellion has dwindled to drugs and poisonous solipsism, has taken some wrong turns in the process of finding it. Is all memory nostalgia? And could our memory sometimes provide the salve for our alienation? When it comes to inquiries of such existential austerity, no one truly has the answers—and Didion certainly doesn’t peg herself as a moral pragmatist—but there is something paradoxical, and cynical, in the idea that for a writer to glance back at the past somewhat amounts to some kind of ideology or conservatism, of the mere fact that the presumption itself is fundamentally ideological and conservative. Didion is no Whig; she doesn’t patently profess whiggish ideals toward civil progress or that the current American dream is based on false de jure. Even her most political pieces (e.g., “Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.),” “California Dreaming,” and “On Morality”) are politically lite, for she only laments on the demotion of collective intellectualism—on the constant trivializing of complex matters. Didion clearly refuses simplicities—she’s not asking for a return to simpler times—because the questions she achingly puts forth aren’t simple and, therefore, are often unanswerable (at least to her.)

But does moral ambivalence absolve Didion from literary judgment?

No. Not really. And it’s difficult to imagine any writer who doesn’t commit a cardinal sin not only against her better judgment as a writer, but also against writing as an institution. Here’s Didion’s contemporary, Janet Malcolm, for example, who pushed many buttons at the beginning of her morally polemical book, The Journalist and the Murderer, in 1990:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

This statement harkens back to when Didion wrote, “Writers are always selling somebody out,” in the preface of Slouching Towards Bethlehem twenty-two years ago, a confession that certifiably reads like a warning of a guerrilla-warfare proportion: not an arrogative apologia but an expression of grandiose, even nihilistic ambition. There’s no denying that “Didion The Reporter” can be painfully human—heartsick, susceptible, and conscientious about her fears and that of others—as Jonathan Yardley writes in his column at the Washington Post—“Didion is a cool observer but not a hardhearted one, so she treats these people with the sympathy they deserve, but not a teaspoon more”—But “Didion The Artist” (also: The Woman, The Wife, The Mother) can be wonderfully contemptuous, willing to tear down the veneers of hypocrisy, rectify the egotistical gait of her generation, dispel the shallow romanticism of middle-class aspirations, and dehumanize Hollywood culture as a nugatory art machine.

Ultimately, she’s selling herself out in her rhetorical suicide, but she’s doing it while unfolding the unspoken facts about her society, about the “children without words.” When she goes to San Francisco and gads about its conclaves of drug addicts and runaways, she seems to be struck by the air of somnambulant aimlessness, the strife for individuation that had unexpectedly morphed into misanthropy. Nobody can really tell her what it is they are all after. Is it political change? These people, high as they all are, Didion seems to say, don’t seem able of bringing about any kind of change whatsoever. And she does that through a prose flat of drama; the paragraphs are glowingly self-contained like ambers; the anecdotes fragmentary. She doesn’t ask questions, but we do sense a skeptical afterglow, which is so Didion, at each turn of the phrase. And yes, we also sense her yearn for some kind of an authoritarian order, for sameness, which is phenomenal, and something almost no one at that time, in the thick of it, was sensing.

And yet, this “nostalgia” for totalitarianism, the muttered bitterness toward the political and artistic naiveté of the hippies, the sense that the middle class has gone off the rails, are merely the immediate buoys that she is able to discern afloat her own foggy sea of modern anxiety. She is not extracting solutions from the past, because, to Didion, her past is infurietalungly sketchy and crocked. Even at the last leaf, Didion is searching for something; searching for herself, for her daughter who hasn’t been adopted yet, for some kind of insight as to what those kids are doing by hanging out in Golden Gate Park. She doesn’t seem to care if it made her sound like an old fogy to ask, “What is it you all are after?” An irresistible question that any essayist or reporter cannot help not to ask.

• Title: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
• By: Tom Wolfe
• Date: 10.5.1968
• Page #: 416

I.

Its virtue was precisely in showing me the possibility of there being something “new” in journalism. What interested me was not simply the discovery that it was possible to write accurate non-fiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories. It was that—plus. It was the discovery that it was possible in non-fiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness, and to use many different kinds simultaneously, or within a relatively short space . . . to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally.

This is Tom Wolfe, in 1972, writing for New York magazine, hollering to his coterie of American writers that there is, after all, a seemingly new path that would save American journalism, and the American fiction as well, from sterility and irrelevance. His essay, “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism,’” isn’t just an invitation brimmed with moxie and hopeful rebellion against the bureaucracy of the newsroom, which encourages unhealthy competition between reporters and between the reporters and their establishments. It’s not, as one may prematurely conclude from the essay’s title, a new interpretation of journalism, but rather a celebration of its powers against the old artifice called the novel. Or, to put it more categorically, the kind of novel that revels in modern self-referentialism and dirty minimalism, that seems to reduce the pressure at the level of form and sentence and detail. What Wolfe essentially argues is that journalism needs to allocate the qualities of social realist writing (Balzac, Zola, Dickens, James, Sinclair Lewis; you name it) while making the characters in the piece come alive, and have their dialogue come through the text without the labor of “telling”—a labor that fundamentally saps the vitality of both the reporter and her reportage.

To Wolfe, what makes a reporter better than the novelist, is that former hasn’t yet realized the extent of her journalistic repertoire, save for Jimmy Breslin of The New York Herald Tribune, who “made it a practice to arrive on the scene long before the main event in order to gather the off-camera material, the by-play in the make-up room, that would enable him to create character . . . to gather ‘novelistic’ details, the rings, the perspiration, the jabs on the shoulder.” It is the historical argument that reality is always more significant than anything the novelist can invent, that the finality of the real is always above the debatability of the real. Of course, Wolfe is not naive enough to dismiss the fact that many novelists research their subjects or simply sneak chunks of witnessed or remembered reality into their books, but he essentially sees that many of them—or all of them, if they insist of calling themselves novelist—veers away from their research, from the dull fidelities of real life, toward the grandiose, the parabolic finish, the moral enticement; products that that only a creative mind can fashion.

To combat such a tempting swerve, Wolfe, in a surprising gesture, doesn’t direct his writers to get out onto the street and starts copying the little details or champion the travails of the Everyday Man, as Joseph Mitchell did in the 1930s during his stint at The New Yorker, but rather to seek out subjects whose reality is symptomatically antipodal to the Everyday Man’s: untraditional, wild, dangerously egotistical, and intellectually rebellious. Indeed, Wolfe’s portfolio—from his essays to his nonfiction to his fiction—seldom invests in observing Middle Class America; it rather exults in enlightening it on what is going on “out there.”

We see this in the 1968’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe’s seminal model of what his “New Journalism” can offer, which follows the exploits of larger-than-life Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as they trip their way round the US in the 1960s, turning on the masses and experimenting in group consciousness; all under the influence of LSD and a multimedia of sensual bombardment. It is, indeed, a classic work of psychedelic literature, whose brilliant exploration into the social upshots of stimulants offers an unsentimental tableau of the counterculture movement, where the reporter, while unafraid to declare his presence and even recognize the ironies around him, dissolves in the mise-en-scène of events, allowing the minds of those people with whom he travels and interviews speak and speak back, often by inhibiting their mindsets without losing his sobriety. Wolfe’s modus operandi is virtually the antithesis of what Hunter S. Thompson does in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where he who posited himself as the framework for his texts, through a drug-induced haze, all the while cogitating on the failure of the 1960s counterculture.

II.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, coincidentally enough, ends with a recognition of failure—the movement, once it grows beyond the confines of group idealism, loses its grip on reality through a great error of underestimation, that great outcomes are but randomly connected to its endeavors, that LSD has become impotent in facilitating the group’s intellectual revolt. In short, Kesey, after a fake suicide note and a heady flight to Mexico, gets busted for several marijuana related offences; the Pranksters dissipate; and The Acid Test Graduation consequently fails from the lack of leadership and from the ongoing social divide.

But before the book reaches its bathos, the bulk of its narrative reads like a spectacle, which also happens to be the Pranksters’ state of mind and primary concern. Indeed, not only did Kesey and his confederacy of agitated souls film their travel to the east—a constant recourse to Hermann Hesse’s pilgrimage novella, Journey to the East—but they turned everywhere they went into living, organic models of their vision:

A few times Sandy and Kesey and Walker would walk up into the forest with axes and cut some wood for the house-but that wasn’t really the name of it at Kesey’s. Sandy could see Kesey wasn’t primarily an outdoorsman. He wasn’t that crazy about unspoilt Nature. It was more like he had a vision of the forest as a fantastic stage setting…in which everyday would be a happening, an art form…

Never mind that there’s an obvious plot hole in this kind of transcendental filmmaking, which is the lack of an original point of transcendence—an underlying philosophy, an essence of tangible concern, a strict religious doctrine—because the Pranksters are seemingly more interested in a game of shared experiences; that it is the journey, not the destination, which endows them with purpose.

Indeed, the reality of the spectacle, as an outward manifestation of the LSD trip, has certainly aided the Prankster’s passage into a world resplendent with cheerful spontaneity and infantilism, which subsequently transformed the very physical spaces through which they travelled; their famous psychedelic bus—codenamed “Further”—was the very vehicle of their geographical, and metaphorical, exploration. However, once Wolfe enters the scene and begins to unravels the mindset of the Pranksters, one by one, the spectacle, slowly but surely, begins to turn inward, to a reality that has warped into something very different:

On those long stretches of American superhighways between performances the bus was like a pressure cooker, a crucible like one of those chambers in which the early atomic scientists used to compress heavy water, drive the molecules closer and closer together until the very atoms exploded. On the bus all traces of freakiness or competition or bitterness or whatever was intensified.

“All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.”

Friedrich Nietzsche — Beyond Good and Evil

• Title: In Cold Blood
• By: Truman Capote
• Date: 01.01.1966
• Page #: 368

I.

When Annette Grant of the Paris Review finally coaxed John Cheever for a one last interview session during a suburban afternoon at his house in Ossining, New York, after he had spent most of the morning keenly dodging the occasion by sawing wood and swimming in his outdoor pool, the first question she asked concerned the nature of fiction and its immutable relationship to lying—that lying, not truth telling, is the only utility in which a novelist can uncork the fermented bottle of reality. “Rubbish,” said Cheever, a rather abrupt answer in which—we can imagine—the fired neurons had instantly morphed his face into livid disbelief, before he had to collect himself for a better delineation:

For one thing the words “truth” and “reality” have no meaning at all unless they are fixed in a comprehensible frame of reference. There are no stubborn truths. As for lying, it seems to me that falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked or taken . . . The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

The last sentence is important. It underscores the singularity when the act of “telling of lies” becomes a redemptive boon—when a writer’s words cease to safely observe life from the margins but set out to explain it from every possible angle, to bring it anxiously closer to reality. Fundamentally, this is what most great novels strive to accomplish, and, broadly, this may be the exclusive route that connects all literary canons of every civilization, from East to West, together.

But as the history of human folly has shown us, a lie en route to accepted truth loses its longevity once it keeps repeating itself dormantly, over and over again; it needs to be tinkered and diddled, polished and periodically readjusted; it needs to change its form and be unafraid to stealthily extrapolate its resources from the well-guarded infrastructure at the other side of the thorny spectrum—from the towering bank of facts. This kind of subversive permutation can also be traced, and studied, by the markedly visible, rough-trodden path left behind by the novel’s continuous shedding of skins; after all, the transition from realism to modernism in the realm of books is essentially an abject evolution to prevent structural calcification. A new form of the novel had to be established to give realism the time to rejuvenate as much as to contain the growing fragmentation of the twentieth century—to excavate the truth of Alfred Prufrock’s “overwhelming question.”

But what if the truth is achingly dismantled and requires a necessary assemblage in order to erect a meaningful edifice out of it? What if truth is stranger than fiction? In fact, what if truth needs fiction to vitally exist at all?

To avoid unnecessary cynicism, it must be said that questions concerning the veracity of fiction and the ingenuity of truths and facts, and the relationship between them, are often unanswerable, but at least to Truman Capote, a modern writer who discovered that familiarity does breed contempt, and that truth can be so nauseating that sometimes needs the equalizing salve of imagination, a concoction had to be conceived in order to consolidate the seemingly inconsolable; he named it “The Nonfiction Novel”—an oxymoronic child of falsehood and truthfulness.

II.

The impetus that gestated Capote’s nonfiction novel was buried deep within the national section of The New York Times when he, through a fateful chance, spotted a news article that stirred his chardonnay-soaked stupor: A family of four –the Clutters– had been shot to death in a secluded midwestern farmhouse in the early hours of 15 November 1959. Though the crime in itself, despite being suspiciously motiveless, did not interest Capote at a fundamental level (“the subject matter was purely incidental”), he neurologically recognized that the slaughter had a kind of mythical quality, and that, as he told George Plimpton of The New York Times seven years later, “murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time.” William Shawn, his editor at The New Yorker, agreed to back the project in return for first-publication rights, and Capote and Harper Lee, his friend and stabilizer to his bicoastal, larger-than-life persona, left for Holcomb, Kansas, three days later, arriving in time for the funeral.

What transpired in the bucolic town of Holcomb, both to Capote and to its disgruntled citizens and law enforcement, has been exhaustingly documented in many articles and journals, and certainly in the book itself, and so I will not belabor the details. I am more interested however in the structure of the book; I want to discuss the functioning of Capote’s nonfiction novel, at least in the glib way I have come to understand it—an examination that will, more or less, venture toward the thematic, and the therapeutic, treatment of In Cold Blood.

III.

For many literary critics, Capote’s nonfiction novel isn’t exactly… novel. Its foundation harkens back to Daniel Defoe‘s The Storm (1704), a report in which John J. Miller of the Wall Street Journal hails as the “first substantial work of modern journalism.” The recounting of the tempest that had “destroyed woods and forests all over England” inarguably wouldn’t have substantiated its veracity without using journalism’s most distinguishable tool: The interview. “No pen could describe it, nor tongue express it, nor thought conceive it unless by one in the extremity of it,” writes Defoe, and so, one by one, he introduces his eyewitnesses all the while cross-pollinating their testimonies and leveraging the gleeful terror of human drama. It is resourcefully a valuable tradition that boasted many fiction and nonfiction authors alike, including Twain, Dickens, Steinbeck, James Agee and Lillian Ross.

And Capote is irrefutably among them, but his insistence that his self-proclaimed innovation sturdily weaves “immaculately factual” reportage and fictional techniques rather foments a curious revisiting if not an eagle-eyed scrutiny—a worthwhile pursuit, since reading In Cold Blood for the first time the reader is utterly hopeless and submissive to Capote’s captaincy of the event’s unraveling, as much as to his peerless talent of navigating a story that is as tumultuous and multitudinous as a grisly murder set in the heart of America (geographically speaking, the infrequently violent Holcomb is located in the exact middle of the United States.)

 And maybe that’s the reason that made Capote convince himself that he had drifted from the mainstream and come across a fertile ground of literary newness—a seemingly crime novel whose account not only factual but also unfettered from the tired conventions, the artistic limitations, and the vapid vulgarism that had cheapened it. In fact, what essentially made In Cold Blood exceptional when it was published in the mid 1960s is that its style, its storytelling neatness, was distinctly familiar and controlled. Instead of embracing the era’s experimental obsession toward configuration, of molding and hammering the novel into something unrecognizable and “post-modern” —matters in which any literary writer of the day would have enjoyed as a chronicler of her time— the mannerist Capote rather looked back and veered toward the meticulous, the copious, and the wonderfully conscious and multi-conscious model of realism, a traditional territory contemporarily encompasses many nonfiction authors and great American novelists like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. If In Cold Blood can be accused of being transgressive, however, its transgressions, then, both as a crime and nonfiction novel, have to be grounded on spearheading the verboten psychological anxieties of American violence, that it shows them as inextricably linked to class resentment and moral identity—American unmentionables.

IV.

The opening section of In Cold Blood is landscaped with a Steinbeckian starkness that imbues Holcomb with ghost-town misery and commercial enfeeblement, a village in which the “celebrated expresses never pause here,” and where one would stopover only to pump his car from its two gas stations, thanks to their proximity to the highway. The entire town, based on Capote’s panoramic summary, feels equally homely and vulnerable, like an old, retired man living alone in a wooden cabin with a bountiful lake nearby, going about his days tending his vegetable garden in the back yard, occasionally bothered by the austerity of the midwestern climate but ultimately content with the undisturbed meekness of his surroundings, until, one day, “certain foreign sounds” awakens him from his sleep, all shriveled and shivered from their plangent violence—a kind of violence that germinates distrust in one’s heart and leaks black fantasies into one’s mind before it mutates to irresistible fear. And for Holcomb, this metastasizing fear barges in through the form of “four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.”

“Six human lives.”

Already, and In Cold Blood makes a curious, if not a suspenseful, grouping of victims—the first four are the Clutters (Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon) and the other two are the partnered desperados (Perry Smith and Dick Hickock). This doesn’t mean that Capote is complacently equating the moral status of the Clutters with their coldblooded killers, but one can look back at that sentence, after reading the book once, and sense that Smith and Hickock are a vital part of Capote’s understanding of the event’s tragic symbolism, that they are not begrudgingly blocked from the novel’s scope of objective empathy but rather sojourned within its penumbra.

And this, once again, unmoors the controversial question that has capsized In Cold Blood’s credibility as a work of astute journalism: How impersonal was Capote with his subjects and with his personal feelings about the killers, especially with Perry Smith?

The answer potentially lies in the second part of In Cold Blood’s definition as a nonfiction novel, whereupon we begin by examining it as such—a novel first, journalism second. And like any close reading of this kind, we refocus our attention toward the narration, to In Cold Blood’s third-person omniscience that suggests nonalignment and godlike surveillance—to Capote’s exact voice.

“Omniscient narration is rarely as omniscient as it seems,” writes The New Yorker’s literary critic James Wood in his enthusiastically dissective primer, How Fiction Works. “Authorial style tends to draw our attention toward the writer, toward the artifice of the author’s construction, and so toward the writer’s own impress.” Indeed, when reading novels (or any kind of eloquent writing really) we often take it for granted the modes in which they operate their narratives—that is, how deliberate they are chosen and controlled by their authors. For example, Nabokov’s Lolita wouldn’t have successfully evoked the narrator’s psychosexual corruption if the mental nodes were detached in exchange for an impersonal observation; likewise, Tolstoy would have surgically destabilized his easy naturalness and historical authority if he had told War and Peace in any other way besides the seamless hovering and orbiting around multiple events and consciousness. For Wood, the authorial omniscience is mostly used when “a writer makes confident appeal to a universal or consensual truth, or a body of shared cultural or scientific knowledge.” A valid assessment to keep in mind while reading In Cold Blood, for despite the scholarly reproofs of Capote’s devious partiality toward Perry Smith, he does attempt to grasp a “consensual truth” behind the massacre and what had caused it. After all, authors play by different rules than law enforcement figures. Their purview is unhindered by legal restrictions if their determination is geared toward a meaningful closure or resolution. And if that means charting the subterranean maps of a pitiful adventurer and mercurial psychopath like Smith, then so be it! Unless, of course, this level of privacy with the subject, and his treasured possessions, accidentally unleashes noxious consequences, which in the case of Capote, these consequences manifested in a form of discrediting criticisms, and, more intimately, around the disturbing similitudes between him and Smith, as Amy Standen of Salon explains:

Capote, like Smith, had been born to absent, unreliable parents. Both had suicide and alcoholism in the family. Both were desperate for acceptance, but they also had ironclad estimations of their own importance — Perry, in his words, was “special”; Capote, in his own, “a genius.” Were it not for his mother’s second marriage and his own considerable charms and angelic good looks (and his keen ability to ingratiate himself to his benefactors), Capote might have ended up as alone and desperate as Smith did. Like Smith, Capote knew exactly what he wanted to be, and he constructed himself accordingly. Capote’s ambitions were realized; Smith’s weren’t.

From a novelistic standpoint, this hardly constitutes an uncommon revelation. Back to James Wood:

As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with the character, to take his or her way of thinking and speaking. A novelist’s omniscience soon enough becomes a kind of secret sharing; this is called “free indirect style,” a term novelists have lots of different nicknames for—“close third person,” or “go into character.”

In another word: interiority—in which we see it being applied in In Cold Blood with exceptional regularity during Smith’s narrative arcs. A willful usage of it occurs in the middle part of chapter two of the book entitled “Persons Unknown” (most likely between pages 107 and 113) where Capote narrates the picnic scene in Mexico twice—the first time from a binocular vision that levelly spies an argument between Hickock and Smith about the killing, and the second time via an emotional x-ray that bares the latter’s schizophrenic daze at the time of the killing:

Spell of helplessness occurred, moments when he “remembered things”—blue light exploding in a black room, the glass eye of a big toy bear—and when voices, a particular few words, started nagging his mind: “Oh, no! Oh, please! No! No! No! No! No! Don’t! Oh, please don’t please!” And certain sounds returned—a silver dollar rolling across a floor, boot steps on hardwood stairs, and the sounds of breathing, the gasps, the hysterical inhalations of a man with a severed windpipe.

As well as unraveling dispersal snippets of Smith’s family history:

Look at his family! Look at what had happened here! His mother, an alcoholic, had strangled to death on her own vomit. Of her children, two sons and two daughters, only the younger girl, Barbara, had entered ordinary life, married, begun raising a family. Fern, the other daughter, jumped out of a window of a San Francisco hotel. (Perry had every since “tried to believe she slipped,” for he’d loved Fern. She was “such a sweet person,” “so artistic,” a “terrific” dancer, and she could sing, too. “Id she’d ever had any luck at all, with her looks and all, she could have got somewhere, been somebody.”

V.

It has to be contested, then, that if Capote had only presented a criminal account by its plaid-colored barebones, prosaically slathered with reportorial irony, In Cold Blood would merely be a thrilling and reflective nonfiction. Because, at an operative level, In Cold Blood feels like a novel. It is a novel! For Capote, with a marvelous butterfly effect, flutters between profound irony and melodrama —the irony of collision and the drama of a not inconsiderable sense of fate— unclothing a portrait that paints of the uncanny, unspoken contract that exists between the observer and the observed, and the trade-off that can occur when the two become too close, a pact in which they both ultimately stand to lose as much as they have gained. Indeed, by the time we have come to know Smith and his fated family, for whom the “solution” to life has frequently been violent suicide, we do not scorn this belief; we share his fantasies, his superstitions, his sense of “destiny” (especially for his victims), and learn a real sympathy for the “fate” of the outsider in this society—we learn the truth. And thanks to Capote’s exemplary flow of sentences and paragraphs, when he finally presents Smith’s account of the murder, he almost disappears entirely as an authorial presence: With an intoxicating chill, we are lured, unescorted, into the mind of the killer, and then disposed of, with an unforgettable freeze-dried abandon.

And the final point worth contesting is that In Cold Blood, by being a novel first, sidesteps the hurdle that has always bedeviled the nonfiction book: the yearn to reach a profound resolution. It has been revealed that once Smith and Hickock had been executed, Alvin Dewey, the supervising investigator, expected to experience a release, a sense of “a design justly completed”, but he felt nothing of the kind. At first, this was Capote’s problem too: the completion of the design was something the book itself had to accomplish. And though the author had boldly prided himself on his accuracy, he decided, perhaps grimly, to break his own rules by providing a beautifully optimistic lie guised as a beautifully optimistic ending: Dewey’s coincidental springtime encounter with Susan Kidwell, Nancy Clutter’s closest friend, in the Garden City graveyard four years after the murders. Life goes on, Capote seems to be saying. Cries become whispers. From a novelistic perspective, the scene, despite its rosy sentimentalism, is impeccably wise; from a journalistic one, it is an irredeemable sin, a murder against the sanctity of journalism. And in spite of this, and only because he had demonstrated a relentless and earnest vehemence toward the pursuit of truth, like any hardworking journalist, we would have to allow Capote the much deserved right to say his defense: To argue that the idea of ending with the executions, particularly of Perry, his ersatz brother, had struck him as too brutal. “I felt I had to return to the town, to bring everything back full circle, to end with peace.” And it is a peace that can resolutely be resolved in two ways: either by suspending the author by the gallows of noncredibility, or by etching his name on literary journalism’s walk of fame. The ultimatum should be left to the reader, the genuinely involved bystander.

The cover of The New Yorker in which John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” took over the entire issue.

They have things like the atom bomb
So I think I’ll stay where I “ahm”
Civilization, I’ll stay right here

 The Andrews Sisters (with Danny Kaye) — “Civilization”

• Title: Hiroshima
• By: John Hersey
• Date: 8.31.1946
• Page #: 189

I.

The front cover of the New Yorker on the 31^st of August, on the year 1946, must have been editorially commissioned, and illustrated, with a sense of wry discontent (which is not totally uncharacteristic of the magazine.) The full-paged artwork, which depicts a crowd of people (presumably New Yorkers) in a state of elated frolicking in a nameless public park, doesn’t spiritually coalesce with the exclusive content of the issue—an article called “Hiroshima” penned by John Hersey; an astonishingly objective account of the titular Japanese city and its populace during the immediate fallout of the atomic bomb. The cartoon is presumably intended to stultify the essence of American stoicism among its post-war generation, or, perhaps less cynically, to capture the zeitgeist of complacency in its zenith before the dreadful truth of the nuclear bomb, and its transmogrifying effect on Hiroshima, plunges the entire country into a morass of abyssal concern.

Of course, by reading the story itself, one would seldom confront such level of morbid irony prima facie, for the underpinnings of Hersey’s story are completely divorced from New Yorker’s moral relativism; in fact, Hiroshima’s focal strength is that it diverts, and subverts, any sense of moral enthusiasm in favor of keen descriptions and concise furnishment of scenes (more on that later.) The lack of prefatory exegesis, for one, even in later editions, immediately underscores Hersey’s principle ambition with his reportage: To present and consequently humanize the “oriental other” when it’s besieged with a crisis of direst proportions—all told without contradictions, without equivocations, and certainly without imputations. As Dan Gerstle writes in the Dissent, “Hersey intended Hiroshima to be a comment on the Second World War and the man-made crises that defined it.”

And from journalism’s standpoint at the time, both Hersey and Hiroshima defined the model that would later inform the styles and tones of future reporting endeavors set in a foreign milieu, as seen in Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History (1983) and Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: The Ordinary Lives of North Korea (2009). This model, which thoughtfully borrows the techniques of fiction in ways that sustain journalistic neutrality, brings forth a wartime narrative whose content is catalogued without a cringe or obvious woefulness (though it can be cringey and woeful at times.) And just as the atomic bomb turned out to be an experiment that had its detractors, so did Hersey’s experimental writing; many cultural critics reproved him for being witheringly unsympathetic in his “denatured journalism,” and the fact it willfully eschews sensationalism precisely makes it the thing it doesn’t want to be in the first place—because, by doing that, the narrative refocuses its tension on the spectacles of war and the hedonisms of foreign suffering, which thereby relegates the reader from being a participator to a mere voyeur.

Such antiquated criticisms, however, don’t hold up when one assays the delicate level of operation in which Hersey scaffolds his heavy realism. In many ways, his journalistic mission is tantamount to the low-level reconnaissance of an aircraft spruce—he is there, hovering above his subjects, not participating, but observing, really observing, dutifully, recording and scrutinizing and divulging; not like a god or arbiter of judgment, but like a neorealist filmmaker attempting to say, “here is the reality as I see it.” Indeed, in a letter addressed to historian Paul Boyer, Hersey explains, “The flat style was deliberate, and I still think I was right to adopt it. A high literary manner, or a show of passion, would have brought me into the story as a mediator; I wanted to avoid such mediation, so the reader’s experience would be as direct as possible.”

That being said, Hersey’s Hiroshima is not ingeniously bankrupt. The starkness and the unbearable lightness of those 31,000 words, which had demanded an infallible control of tone, signal a hypnotic traffic between the minuteness of wartime fatigue and the hysterical extremities of danger, often within the same breath. Here’s Hersey, for example, unromantically summarizing the common tenacity of a common man named Yoshida, who is introduced with a couple of paragraphs as “an energetic man”:

[He] was just part of the general blur of misery through which they moved. His cries for help brought no response from them; there were so many people shouting for help that they could not hear him separately. They and all the others went along. Mr. Yoshida saw the wooden mission house the only erect building in the area go up in a lick of flame, and the heat was terrific on his face. Then flames came along his side of the street and entered his house. In a paroxysm of terrified strength, he freed himself and ran down the alleys of Nobori-cho, hemmed in by the fire he had said would never come. He began at once to behave like an old man; two months later his hair was white.

This is one of the chief powers of Hiroshima’s “anesthetized objective narration,” is that despite its seeming indifference to its post-nuclear horrors, its storytelling –the reporting itself– is not psychologically distant. When carefully reading Hiroshima one should find Hersey’s application of narrative techniques is that it achieves maximum potential when it alerts to interiority, like when Dr. Fujii cursorily examines his injuries “by the light of a lantern” and check-lists each one of them with clinical diagnosis; or when Father Kleinsorge ascribes his ongoing survival to the “talismanic quality” of a bag he found amidst the detritus of nuclear explosion; or when the pastor Mr. Tanimoto recognizes the brutal irony when he gets overthrown by a midstream current while traversing a river, pleading, “Please, God, help me to cross. It would be nonsense for me to be drowned when I am the only uninjured one”—or how about here! when the paraplegic Miss Sasaki, after 70 pages into the narrative, shares her vintage point of Hiroshima with the reader for the first time, from a Red Cross car, and discerns something that went unnoticed by the five ambulatory survivors, which Hersey records with damaged lyricism:

Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the river banks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones.

II.

But the book itself: we still have to talk about the book itself.

It should be obvious from the first leaf of Hiroshima is that its impetus, both as an open-ended morality tale and post-nuclear lore, hinges on the aspirant survival of its six main characters (which, in the “aftermath” chapter, follows some of them to the grave.) Their foibles and changing outlooks are meant to recapture Hiroshima’s class aspirations before and after the bombing, which Hersey somewhat fails, though not by a fault of his own, seeing that the elite and military classes are suspiciously absent if not unavailable. Still, Hersey’s ability to exhibit the extraordinary abilities of the seemingly ordinary humans is a bravura achievement; that his best gift to humanity is to catch it during an act of modest greatness—and to share it with said humanity.

Hersey shows this with relative acuteness within the spliced arcs of Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, whose vital simplicity to make a living, both as a mother and widow, unfailingly escapes the loftiness of politics and war. Even her momentary lapse into resentment against America is grounded in its provenance. It is only when she suspects the loss of her sewing machine, “her entire means of livelihood,” that she begins to harbor a sense of vestigial acrimony –an acrimony that didn’t evince over the loss of her hair from radiation sickness or over the dangerous dislodgment from her house at the time of bombing– which, nonetheless, soon abates once she regains financial independence in Nobori-cho, after she resumes her vocation as a seamstress.

With Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a bonhomous pastor and accidental hero, Hersey manifests another kind of simplicity that occasionally borders on dumbness—e.g., human selflessness. For Mr. Tanimoto’s tireless rescue missions throughout the course of the book single-handedly demonstrate the humble humanity of Japanese culture. His anxiety and self-inflicted guilt seem to deepen when he’s out of harm’s way, as if he needs to occupy himself with danger in order to find the willingness to live.

Such restless martyrdom, however, is initially absent, and perhaps reasonably so, in Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit priest living in Hiroshima. At the beginning of his arc, Hersey creates a symptomatic juxtaposition when he marries Father Kleinsorge’s awareness of the “increasingly xenophobic Japan” with his gastric ailments induced by wartime diet, as if one discomfort can be the direct manifestation of the other—a kind of mutual incompatibility. It is only later, after the drop of the bomb, that the German priest begins to experience the indiscriminate force of nuclear crisis, its blindness toward social hierarchy and petty nationalism, to eventually marvel at the common generosity of the Japanese people after a fateful encounter with a woman passing out tealeaves with polite kindness:

For weeks, he had been feeling oppressed by the hatred of foreigners that the Japanese seemed increasingly to show, and he had been uneasy even with his Japanese friends. This stranger’s gesture made him a little hysterical.

These encounters with kind strangers, which occur more than once in the book, extend their metaphorical mysticism to another main character. This time to Miss Sasaki, who after a prolonged period of hospital neglect and lonesome agony –not to mention being coldly abandoned by her fiancé over her disability– begins to grow more and more disenchanted with life, like many of the thousands victims adrift in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, thankfully, like a runner imparting a baton to his fellow kin, Father Kleinsorge, now the stranger in this exchange, bestows his religion to Miss Sasaki, who evidently discovers the solace and wanted succor that she had mercilessly lacked. Her conversion to Catholicism, and her becoming a nun, bespeaks the volume of spiritual elation and its capacity to surmount the despotic anguishes of war.

Finally, when it comes to recording the scientific and clinical discoveries surrounded around the atomic bomb, Hersey makes a curious selection when he extracts them from the personal and professional insights of his final two candidates, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki and Dr. Masakazu Fujii—a testament to say that even when two individuals share the same nationality, race, class, and career, their life stories in the post-nuclear world may never be the same. With Dr. Sasaki, we witness another extent of human selflessness and learn about the three stages of radiation sickness, especially its proportional severity to the spatial distance from the center point of impact (Hersey provides exact calibrations of said distances when he introduces the main characters for the first time, as if in anticipation to their subsequent illnesses.) With Dr. Fujii, we get to philosophize on the irony of human life and how, even when it manages to escape the most unnatural disasters unscathed, it remains susceptible to human greed (of all the six survivors, Dr. Fujii is the least harmed from the atomic bomb and rather leads a comfortable life at the top of Japan’s cultural totem pole, until he dies after being in a coma for eleven years, leaving behind a family with inheritance dispute.) Dr. Sasaki and Dr. Fujii also express two types of reactions that most Japanese had harbored during the aftermath of the bomb—that of moral indignation, specifically when the former says about the Americans through an undercurrent of resentment, “I think they ought to try the men who decided to use the bomb and they should hang them all,” and that of cheerful obsequiousness, like when Dr. Fujii carries out another kind of hanging: “a sign inscribed in English [outside his clinic,] in honor of his conquerors.”

III.

In retrospect, it is remarkable how Hersey supplies such an illuminating confection of human characters and astute reporting in such a short volume and within the sober parameters of journalism. A significant part that makes Hiroshima such as a fascinating, if not a thrilling, read is that Hersey clearly is less interested in the moral basis of war than in the immediate and indirect experience of it, its power to bring down existential peripateticism (i.e. dislodgement and poverty) and harmful ramifications (i.e. radiation sickness and dismay in humanity.) It is true that Hersey has none of the authorial swagger or the pretentious philosophizing of his contemporaries; for Hiroshima, by denuding itself of excess moral package, reinforces the case for nonfiction in general, and wartime reporting in particular, that it is most powerful when it harnesses its energy away from the decries of patriotism and laminations of immorality and all the histrionics of warfare to rather heed the unlikeliest and most unobtrusive of heroes, just as Hersey does when he passes the final pulpit from Father Kleinsorge, who in a letter to his church probes the moral justification of the bomb, to the ten-year-old Toshio Nakamura whom Hersey traces at several, disjointed instances throughout the narrative, and whom seals it off –in the original, 1946 script– with a seeming shrug of shoulders and mechanical candor about what had happened to his friends after the bomb, “…and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.”

1.

In George Bernard Shaw’s satirical play Pygmalion, flower girl Eliza Doolittle is coercively instructed by Mr. Henry Higgins to pose as a genteel duchess not only in manners and dress, but in lingo as well—a role which espouses far refined a speech for Eliza to emulate. Conversely, in Tom Hooper’s biopic The King Speech, Prince Albert (later known as King George VI), while possessing all the posh to converse in a cultivated discourse, mercilessly lacks the ennobled tongue to speak it, thus compelling him to receive the necessary phonetic lessons to mellow out his stammers. Eliza and Prince Albert then are antipodal—indeed, each one has what the other one severely lacks. Therefore, both characters are distinguished by their voices, and both have a different story to tell and a personal adversity to surmount. The same is precisely true for the voiceless character that could come from a silent film or from a modern videogame; he or she still has an anecdote to share regardless of their verbal shortcomings.

So when Visceral Games decided to give the mechanical engineer Isaac Clarke a voice in Dead Space 2, who has remained practically mute in the original Dead Space, they also had to give him a new personality to go along with it. Because, as it turns out, it is inevitably difficult to tell a story like the one in Dead Space 2—a story that refocuses its tension on the monsters occupying the human psyche rather than those on the outside—without having its leading character utters a grievance or a closer examination on what is truly going on. In other words (and pun is desperately intended here) what has resulted from this voice transplant is two Isaac Clarkes: one whose psychology is the same as the player, and one who is diagnostically different.

***

I didn’t notice such resounding imparity until I revisited the original, and shortly after I had finished Dead Space 2. My initial experience upon comparing the inception of the two games can be summed up as follow: both are equally intense, but the way they emphasize Isaac’s exposition is narratively uneven, or at least individually different.

***

First: Dead Space. Here, the game beings with Isaac literally seated in the same manner the player is presumably seated, and entitled with the same limited viewpoint and knowledge the player is presumably entitled. With only the back of his torso is visible to us, Isaac powerlessly witnesses the scene that is unfolding in front of him beyond the glass of his starship, a scene that shortly turns into a monstrous crisis that will perpetually change his life and mystify his sanity. But Isaac isn’t alone in this crisis. The voices and images that accompany him in his journey, albeit querulously, belong to two of his comrades, Kendra Daniels, a technologist that was originally assigned to board the Ishimura and repair its communication systems, and Zach Hammond, the senior security office who frequently travels with Isaac and Kendra aboard the Kellion, the USG starship that clumsily careens into the Ishimura and thrusts the clique into a hellish repair mission.

What is seemingly clear from the beginning is that the stars of Dead Space aren’t meant to share the same screen and the same screen time, not merely due to their forceful separation by the Necromorphs, the game’s horrific rendition of what extraterrestrial zombies would look like, but more so to their wireless interactivity through holograms and voice messages. This leads to an imbalanced configuration that soon results in an imbalanced authority over Isaac’s agency. Shortly into the opening chapter of Dead Space, Kendra and Zach begin to torn Isaac apart, figuratively, not only by their slavish demands of his engineering skills but also by their mistrusts of each other. Their camaraderie in other words is doomed from the start.

Conceptually speaking though, this isosceles companionship does make sense, for Isaac’s lack of voice haplessly complements his neutral angle as an errand boy among his teammates, whom are equally helpful to Isaac as much as they are troublesome. Indeed, Dead Space is one of the few survival horror games that the existence of survivors doesn’t always translate into a reassuring comfort. Almost all the living characters that Isaac meets aboard the Ishimura are psychologically insane or unyieldingly zealot, or are illusions of Isaac’s incipient spiral into psychosis, and the few honest ones who are willingly helpful die in the most brutal way imaginable. This compounds very well with the banal truism, silence is golden, because Dead Space feels at its safest when it is swathed in silence, and when only the discernible sounds it emanates are Isaac’s raspy grunts and the metallic screams of the Ishimura.

Then again, the key word here is feel, because to be incessantly entrapped in silence is unnerving in Dead Space, even when we are running the airless gamut of zero gravity where we might think it is uninhabited of Necromorphs (well, it is not). In fact, there is something tragically sadistic that the only instance for Isaac’s vocal cords to work is when he is writhing in pain or being anatomically severed: when a bodiless tentacle is hauling him by the leg to its bottomless den; when a petulant Lurker is mischievously assaulting his face and decapitating it from its body; when an indomitable Hunter is skewering his torso in midair and savagely splitting him in pieces; when a lanky Divider is squeezing his throat from a distance and plucking off his head by one of its appendages. But all of this seems to be strangely merciful, because the ruthlessness of Dead Space is not by the multitude of methods it kills off its hero, but by the way it depraves him from crying for help and rather incarnating him in a dead space. By making him wordless, expressionless.

It’s not until Isaac miraculously sets his path to freedom, out from Aegis VII —the mining colony where the ostensibly divine and mescaline Red Marker resides— that he finally takes off his helmet for the first time, revealing expressions of exhaustion and mortification distressing his face. It is such a pivotal moment, almost rewarding really. It doesn’t matter we don’t get to see Isaac’s face at the beginning of the game (well, we can, but that opportunity is fiendishly small and easily missable, so constituently it doesn’t count), because we can effortlessly testify that the Isaac who was obscurely introduced in the first opening scene of Dead Space is not quite the same at its end. Not merely because of the madness and the betrayal he has experienced for the last hours. Rather it is the horrifying and lifelike hallucination he has of Nicole Brennan; Isaac’s girlfriend who presumably had killed herself aboard the Ishimura, and also the first face that we see in Dead Space, and Dead Space 2.

2.

Dead Space 2, in its own morbid way, feels instantaneously sacrilegious; at least to the way it throws out that what has been trimly established in its precursor, for the heroic stoicism that Isaac Clarke inadvertently wore (or used to wear) has literally been taken away. What we get in the opening cinematic is this: Nicole speaking to us, speaking to Isaac, through a hologramic transmission ala Dead Space, and Isaac, alarmingly unfaithful to the original set-up, appears in a small video screen in a one-on-one fashion. The face that he gives us however is unexpectedly familiar as much as it is conspicuously rapt, for Isaac doesn’t merely give us a face, but a smiling face. And that voice—the voice that Visceral Games have found it apt to titivate its silent hero—is not of the husky groan that we got used to in the original; instead, it is irresistibly dreamy.

What remains the same however is Isaac’s pitiless nescience of what has happened to him and what is intangibly happening around him. Indeed, the opening sequence that Dead Space 2 plunges its panic-stricken technician is tumultuously short, instilled with enough terror and dismemberment to regress him (and us) back to that particular incident three years ago. So, straitjacketed and disoriented, Isaac is rudely awakened in a psychiatric ward aboard the space station the Sprawl, where midway through his second exodus he changes path to travel back to the source that had etherized him upon the patient table: back to the Ishimura, back to the Red Marker.

But this is not an invitation to nostalgia. Nor it is a dark retrospection of the past. Dead Space 2 is a different game because it feels different. It is startlingly populated and talky despite starring the same number of characters as its original. The inventively constructed partitions that used to separate Isaac from other survivors in the past, whom were (and still are) always driven by their guilt, dementia, or a mix of both, no longer exist. Now it is close and personal. And for reasons that are obscure to me, the confrontations that ensue mechanically remove Isaac’s trademark helmet, which exposes his vulnerable expression to his assaulters and his eye to be punctured with their weapon of choice—a needle (as one of its many metaphors, Dead Space 2 has an odd fetish about eyeballs and eyeballs being yanked out). But there is one person Isaac persistently meets who is neither guilt-ridden nor psychotic: Nicole Brennan, Isaac’s dead girlfriend.

This brings me to the next subtopic: Dead Space 2 isn’t just the story of Isaac. It is the story of Isaac and Nicole, or what seems to be Nicole. It is also a story of redemption, even though, at least to my knowledge, the former didn’t commit anything terribly worthy of redemption. While Nicole is more like an afterthought in Dead Space —her presence in the story is mostly referential and ephemeral— now she is a jarring entity, a major character, a nuisance. But more importantly, she’s a formidable enemy that no plasma cutter would ever penetrate. She is, to be philosophically pretentious, a walking allegory of Isaac’s guilt; an abstract representation of what made him gains a conscious and a voice in Dead Space 2. Thus, it is thematically appropriate that the game finishes its didactic narrative in the way it does: Isaac dueling with Nicole, with his contemptuous self, aswarm with an infinite number of damage-dealing Necromorphs in what it seems to be the Martian landscape from Total Recall.

And yet, it is so disappointing that Dead Space 2 ends up saying so little, about its leading characters and its morally stirring story. Its sermonic exposition against (and about) Unitology for example —the far-reaching, truth seeking, suicide-inflicting religion in the Dead Space universe— miserably falls into deaf ears, because none of its seeming lectures are captivating or warranting enough. (I wished to see pragmatic and thought-provoking issues that felt contemporarily pertinent, not the 26th century version of Jesus Camp). What Dead Space 2 has managed to do is intentionally denuding Isaac from the mystique that he used to bear three years ago, and unintentionally laundering its limb-dismembering cult from the moral ambiguity it used to preach, if there is any. The outcome is a principle mix of good conception and bad execution, a riptide that results in a sequel that awkwardly clashes with its original, making us wonder if their mutual stories and Isaac Clarkes were ever brought up from the same draft.

Nonetheless, Dead Space 2 remains a game about voices, to which, if one desires a chance to survive, one should take heed of its voices. The sequel maliciously introduces two new subspecies that join the evolution rank of the Necromorphs: the Pack and the Stalkers. As the nickname suggests, the Pack is never alone. They attack in a group and they die in a group. They are the least mutated and disfigured species in the game, as they still retain the basic human form of their former selves, which makes killing them morally problematic and messy. But what is messier is that the Pack is created from children. That is, they shriek like children when they attack, and they shriek like children when they die. The end result is usually a pile of massacred youths literally cut down in their prime, and a demoralizing, dispiriting sensation of guilt and shame permeating its way to the brutal thumbs that have killed them.

The Stalkers on the other hand are absolute terror, and they deserve to be brutally killed by every mean possible and then cathartically severed to limbs under the crushing force of Isaac’s leg stomps. Always accompanied with a raging orchestra, they too attack in a group, but they do it with a devilish, concerted strategy while bellowing heart-piercing cries cued from a lively prehistoric exhibition. The braying, squealing, ticking, and wailing that they utter is a part of the said strategy, plunging the entire confrontation into a battle of wit, agony, and shouting curses. But once the skirmish ends in a silent solitude, thus tolling Isaac’s victory over the cunning horde, odds it’s hard for anyone to leave the battlefield undisturbed.

3.

After graduating from Dead Space 2, I went back to Dead Space to reexamine my experience with the silent Isaac, and see whether there is something genuinely different about him. Here is what I wrote in my notebook based on the few hours I spent controlling him:

• Isaac seems to carry out an unusual weight and heaviness about him, which I believe justly convey the bulkiness of his armored suit and his unique lethargy even though they are detriments to the controls.
• Isaac also seems insufficiently trained with the stasis and kinesis modulus, as if he just started to use them for battle—which he is.
• Isaac remains frustrating to maneuver in zero gravity.
• Isaac is ultimately different from Dead Space 2’s Isaac; the latter is more agile, responsive, and experienced, and boasts an amazing vitality despite his malnourishment for the last three years.

But there is one thing that the original Isaac will always prevail in: his voice is always unique, because his voice is my own (or anyone who gets to control him). That said, I am not going to elevate my introspective experience in the same maudlin fashion players often do with their open-ended games (i.e. with moral anecdotes and sublime escapism) simply because Dead Space neither belongs to the same genre  of games nor aspires to follow the description of such games. While there is indeed a dimensional boundary between Isaac and I that I will never be able to breach, there is also a universal and irreducible emotion between us, and that is fear. When Isaac is being dragged by one of the infinite arms of the Hive Mind, I rouse; when Isaac is slowly losing his oxygen level in zero gravity, I gasp; when Isaac is being drenched with oozy vomit spewed by a Spitter, I flinch. Sadly in this case, our experience is horrifyingly mutual. But such dramatic severity with Isaac and the game isn’t always the same contextually. Here is Nora Khan from Kill Screen eloquently describing her jointed “I” of personal suffering with Dead Space and its cultish faith:

At this point in the game, though, I can’t be bothered to care whether the Marker has caused my own madness or widespread death, what its unreadable writing means or even why I am even tasked with its transport. All I know is that it speaks to a powerful fanaticism that reminds me of people joined together in faith, an experience I am not part of. The Marker’s origin is in shared, communal belief, and yet I am alone here, hatefully bound to it, strained and delirious.

The Marker feels to me like the very origin of silence: the silence of death, the silence of prayer. If I wanted to pray now, if Isaac were that type of person, which I am not, he—I, could not aloud. If I did choose to, though, I would pray silently: for a return to speech, to companionship, to gravity, to the certain heft of flesh and sense. A return to my body.

Admittedly, I can still appreciate the Isaac Clarke of Dead Space 2 for what he is, but I don’t think I will ever bequeath him the same level of appreciation I do with his silent self; now he seems too familiar, too mundane, as if he’s blindly been pulled out from the same assembly line that has produced the last ten action heroes for the last ten action games: shaved head, unshaven face, slender build, and a wisecracked mouth. He doesn’t impart the stoic voice that I desperately need during the game’s many moments of desperation, for my self-desperation is precisely the lack of voice. And just like Eliza when she agonizes about her fate in the final act of Pygmalion, wailing, “What’s to become of me? What’s to become of me?”, and like Prince Albert when he confides to his wife that he is unfitted to be a King, crying, “I’m just a Navel Officer”, I too, though less dramatically, wonder where my voice has gone, and question my role with my partner that Dead Space 2 has set me off with.