Good Prose (4 page)

In the first section of the book, Kidder arrives at the doctor’s oasis-like hospital in the desperately poor Haitian countryside. He describes Farmer with wary admiration and then takes a long walk with him into the hills, in pursuit of a patient who needs treatment. The doctor, though suffering from various maladies himself, climbs effortlessly. The author flags. But that (though actual) is a sort of stage business. What really matters is that Kidder provides a way for us to hear Farmer, as if his high pronouncements were coming through our own earthly skeptical ears. They reach the summit, have the meager reward of a Life Saver candy, and then Kidder recounts the scene as they gaze down at the impounded waters of a dam that has drowned the land of countless peasants and relegated them to extreme poverty. And Farmer says, “To understand Russia, to understand Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Boston, identity politics, Sri Lanka, and Life Savers, you have to be on top of this hill.”

Kidder doesn’t respond to Farmer, but says to us: “The list was clearly jocular. So was his tone of voice. But I had the feeling he had
said something important. I thought I got it generally. This view of drowned farmland … was a lens on the world. His lens. Look through it and you’d begin to see all the world’s impoverished in their billions and the many linked causes of their misery. In any case, he seemed to think I knew exactly what he meant, and I realized, with some irritation, that I didn’t dare say anything just then, for fear of disappointing him.”

One of the side effects of saints is that they can make the rest of us feel crummy, or even annoyed. Here the author gets annoyed for us. “With some irritation” is the crucial phrase in the passage. One can imagine the effect if the account were recast in the third person, as in newspaperese: “Farmer said to a reporter …” The scene without the management of the self-revealing narrator would be meaningless or even absurd
.

This is more than convenience, and what happens in microcosm is a model for the whole book. The author’s understanding of the subject becomes the story. Paul Farmer is revealed to us through the growing comprehension of the narrator. This is another example of the narrative of revelation
.

—RT

Point of view is the place from which a writer listens in and watches. Choosing one place over another determines what can and can’t be seen, what minds can and can’t be entered. The choice also deeply affects the tone, the author’s apparent attitude toward the events and people of a story—an element of storytelling that is easiest to spot when it goes wrong and the reader senses, for instance, that the author is condescending toward a
character but doesn’t seem to know it. Point of view is a place to stand, but more than that, a way to think and feel.

The main choice of course is between the third and first person, between a disembodied voice and “I” (in nonfiction synonymous with an aspect of the author). For some, the choice is made before sitting down to write. Some writers feel obliged to use the third person, by tradition the voice of objectivity, the disinterested mode of address appropriate for the newspaper or for history. Other writers, by contrast, seem to adopt the first person as a reflex, even if they are not writing autobiographically. But choosing a point of view really is a choice, fundamental to the construction of nonfiction narratives and carrying serious consequences. No moral superiority inheres in the first or third person, in their many varieties, but the wrong choice can deaden a story or distort it enough to turn it into a lie, sometimes a lie composed of facts.

One thing to consider is the scale of the story. Take, for instance, the opening of
There Are No Children Here
, by Alex Kotlowitz:

The two boys are climbing up a railroad embankment, looking for both adventure and relief from summer in the housing projects of Chicago. A third person hovers over this scene, an observer, but at least on first reading, we don’t think about that person. The observer could have revealed himself, reported perhaps on how he skinned his own knees following the boys. But even though we know he’s there, he remains invisible. To some readers, telling a story this way makes the story incomplete. But if Kotlowitz had revealed himself in this small opening scene, he would have had a lot of explaining to do, about his relation to the two boys and his bona fides and so on, and besides quite possibly boring most readers, all that information would have ruined the scale of the story’s beginning. It would have enlarged the field of vision and made the boys and their world smaller than Kotlowitz wanted them to seem. He wanted to invite us into the boys’ circumscribed landscape. He wanted to tell their story as much as possible from their perspective. A first-person narrator would have ruined the spell that Kotlowitz wanted to create, the readers’ illusion that they are alone with the boys.

So the size of the world that a writer is trying to create often has something to do with the presence or absence of the word “I.” Against a large background, “I” can provide human scale. Most travel writing, for instance, depends on the first person, the figure in the photograph that shows you just how tall the statue is. As a rule, the smaller the canvas, the more intrusive the first person is likely to be.

Even a complex story with multiple characters can be made more immediate by the absence, not the presence, of a first-person narrator. The disembodied voice of the third person can
sometimes allow for greater intimacy with the subject than the first person, as in this passage from
A Civil Action:

Thus begins the introduction to the main character of a nonfiction book. We’re put in bed with him. Actually, we’re asleep with him, not just watching him dream but watching his dream with him. Critics and writers have a term for this technique, a term other than chutzpah. They call it the “restricted third person”
or the “limited third person.” The reader sees the world as the character sees it. This mode seldom appears in pure form. More often we see what the character sees, but also see the character seeing it. It’s a technique more common in fiction, of course.

In nonfiction, the restricted third person has practical costs. The right to use it has to be earned; one can write “she thought” or “he dreamed” only if the person has confessed to the thoughts or the dreams, and only if the writer has good reasons to believe the accounts are true. Jonathan Harr spent eight years writing
A Civil Action
—some of them wasted in devising ways not to write, as he happily admits, but many of them spent in keeping company with his main character, ears and eyes and notebook open during the many times when nothing important was happening. Spending more time with a subject than most writers could afford or tolerate seems the only sure way of building the kind of relationship that can let a writer into someone else’s dream life.

When to prefer the first person to the third? You would almost certainly choose it if you were involved in the events you’re describing, and you would probably feel obliged to choose it if your presence had a knowable effect on the outcome. Choosing the first person can also be more nearly a matter of convenience than honesty. “I” can simply seem the more natural mode, and, in that slight sense only, more honest, less artificial. The involvement of the first-person narrator can be very light indeed. Sometimes “I” is there just to facilitate the movement of the piece: “We met in a nondescript café on the Lower East Side …” Or simply to register what is said: “He told me that he came to places like this because they reminded him of Budapest before the war …”

A variety of the first person is available for this role. One might call it the “first-person minor,” or the “restricted first person,” or the “reasonable person.” The distinguishing characteristic of this point of view lies in the limits and strictures it places on itself. As a rule, not much about the narrator is revealed, including the narrator’s opinions.

The first-person minor has been around for some time. It has long flourished at
The New Yorker
. You can pick it up already well established sixty years ago, with Lillian Ross and her classic profile of Ernest Hemingway—who, within range of Ross’s notebook, reveals himself to be in a punch-drunk (and plain drunk) state of defiance. Its marvelously, almost parodically urbane first line reads: “Ernest Hemingway, who may well be the greatest living American novelist and short-story writer, rarely comes to New York.” The profile feels intimate, and the author does nothing to hide her presence, and yet she manages to seem unobtrusive. She assumes a rather dutiful persona. She appears when Hemingway summons her. We hear nothing of her life. If you stop reading and think about it, you realize that this might have been quite a moment for her, a writer in her early twenties who was profiling the world’s most celebrated author. A candid personal journalist could have made herself into a figure of high drama. Instead Ross makes herself seem like a stock figure of the time, the “gal Friday,” cheerful, omnicompetent, without apparent needs of her own.

Another
New Yorker
writer, John McPhee, has characteristically written in the first-person minor. In his hands, the limited first person, while remaining indistinct in personality, can take
an active hand in things, and by acknowledging his presence, and even the effect of his presence, can help illuminate the subject. The following is a brief scene from McPhee’s book-length profile of Bill Bradley, called
A Sense of Where You Are
. McPhee wrote it when Bradley was a basketball star and not yet a senator. McPhee is watching Bradley practice, and Bradley misses a shot:

This is a utilitarian first person. It’s natural and casual, and it helps readers to see. But sometimes the reportorial first person plays a larger role, not merely useful but vital, as in profiles where the writer must take the measure of a story’s characters. Do they require an identifiable set of eyes to interpret them for the reader, to manage the reader’s reactions to them? There are moments when the first person ought to be restrained, others when the “I” is necessary as a gauge.

A somewhat revelatory first person lies on the wide continuum between the first-person minor and what might be called the first-person major. In some cases, it may seem necessary to
reassure the reader about the accuracy of a story, and one solution may be a first-person narrator who reveals, even if indirectly, how the story was reported. At the extreme, of course, the author’s gradual understanding of the subject becomes the heart of the narrative. This often happens in books about places: Bruce Chatwin’s
In Patagonia
, Ian Frazier’s
Great Plains
.

In his essay “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists,” Mark Kramer praises journalists who tend to present themselves with an “intimate voice, frank, human, and ironic.” But this kind of intimacy is a highly stylized thing. To put it directly, the narrative “I” is a fiction. This is not to say it is a lie. It is an emblem of a personality made up of elements that the author may in fact possess or may only aspire to. As in fiction, the “I” of reportage is a constructed thing, a vast simplification of its creator.

Sometimes the “I” is really out there on the page, self-dramatizing, very present indeed. Sometimes it is the “I” of personal participation in great events or dire social conditions: Mark Twain learning his way around the mining camps of the West, in
Roughing It
. More recently, it’s David Foster Wallace having adventures on a cruise ship or Barbara Ehrenreich describing her taste of life as a minimum-wage worker.

Then there is the interesting case of the late Norman Mailer. He said that his book
Armies of the Night
, originally begun as a magazine article for
Harper’s
, was “history as novel” and “novel as history.” It seems like neither. It looks a lot like reportage, reportage that transforms the first person into the third. This is the book in which Mailer becomes “Mailer,” a character covering and participating in the March on the Pentagon in 1967. At
moments, his deployment of the third-person-first-person feels like a prison break. You feel the liberation in it, the possibilities it opens up to be free of the oppressive “I.” The stance he affects could scarcely be more personal or more revealing, but at the same time it preserves a comic distance from the self. It is both wildly egotistical and grandly self-mocking. It might not have been possible to bring it off at all if Mailer hadn’t already made himself, through his earlier work and his outlandish (and on one occasion criminal) behavior, a public figure whom plenty of people referred to as “Mailer,” and not in the kindest way.