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The Course of Words

Frey’s fatal flaw

Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. This novel — ingested via a CD set with not one but three narrators portraying the four principal roles — from just last year is a good read. Besides wondering how the characters are getting along now, a week after I finished their story, the book still has me regarding greater issues: The need for comedy in the midst of tragedy. The hunger for life being strong among the very well and the very sick (when you’re unconscious your body tries to live), but those in between take suicide as an option. Last, Hornby operating on several levels proves the need for Story.

A Long Way Down is four strangers come to town. Well, four people coincidentally meet on the roof of a London apartment tower known as a suicide spot. An extremely diverse quartet and with different reasons to jump, they decide instead to take the stairs down, at least this night. Yes, it may be sick, and it certainly has rollicking humor, but the Story provides insight. Realistic? Sure, why not?

The Hornby novel has characters saying eventually that because real life has loose ends then their story has loose ends. Yet the loose ends are tied by the end as much as any fiction’s are. That’s Hornby’s narrative in-joke.

We do need sets of coherent narrative at all points of our lives. Because life is not coherent and does not conform to narrative flow, even so-called experimental fiction, we humans must have Story to make some sense of it all. If this is true — and why not? — then this is the out that James Frey needs although does not deserve, and it is the out that Oprah Winfrey deserves but does not need for defending Frey and later cutting him down before millions on television.

Frey has written a couple of books of memoirs, which were revealed to be to a relative degree fabricated. I’ve written too many times about him. But the story of his story keeps providing insight. That Frey was not the addict that he portrayed himself as having been — and one to whom interesting things happened! — would make a boring book. Drunks and druggies in real life are pretty boring, unless they’re people who are important to you, because their progression is all too similar. Too, we’ve had decades of junkie and wino tales. To the criticism that Frey’s are not realistic depictions of addiction and of attempts at recovery, well maybe their truth is too boring to merit a book that people will read.

That people will read. If they don’t, what’s the point?

Oh yes, that they’re led astray from what really happened. And that the story is not realistic or not honest or not true. Well, boo-hoo.

Only Story can get under your skin deeply enough to matter. Story creates empathy, eliminating one’s desire to re-invent the wheel. Non-fiction framed as Story, can lead to change, if well-done. That is the lesson of the current popularity of the memoir. Facts must be woven; whole cloth requires warp and woof and dye.

That lies Frey’s flaw: bad writing. If his memoir actually was believable, it would not have been doubted. That’s no tautology, when you consider all the memoirs that blogs have not outed, and one’s life story has to be woven as much as written to be told. Literary believability contains versions of realism, honesty and truth, and effective writers, like Hornby, know those are different qualities. Good readers know this. Lots of people, though, think these all are synonyms. -30-

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