Good Prose (5 page)

In fiction, another variation is possible, the “unreliable narrator.” We are meant to understand such narrators in a different way than they understand themselves. This would be a hard act to pull off in nonfiction. But one writer has come close: the late Hunter Thompson, who presents himself as a drug-and-alcohol-crazed, hallucinating madman, driving a red rental car across the desert, on the first page of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

In Thompson, hyperbole and fantasy don’t masquerade as objective truth but describe the inner life of a hallucinating “I.” Thompson stretches the boundaries of nonfiction, maybe to a point where they ought to be stretched now and then.

The attempt to render characters in a piece of writing, to create the illusion that people are alive on a page, is so essential to storytelling, and so dependent on every other aspect of the art, that it can’t help but seem diminished by the standard term “characterization.” That word might better be limited to perfunctory efforts. Examples of these are abundant, in fiction and in many sorts of nonfiction. Here is one, from
Game Change
, the most popular political book of a recent season:

Journalists who have to get a book written before its topic is stale may not have time to do more than this, to depict people as dolls or “action figures,” quickly and easily understood. And moving stick figures around can be enough to give a narrative shape and dramatic action, and these, along with information and especially insider information, are all that many readers expect, or require, or even want. Great writers remind us that more is possible. Here, for example, is how George Eliot introduces the heroine of
Middlemarch:

These sentences begin the book’s opening paragraph, which is long by modern standards but does a lot of work. By its end Miss Brooke’s plain manner of dress has become not only a means of suggesting her physical beauty, but also an entrance to her family history, her social station, the character of the place where she lives, and, on top of that, her tendencies of thought and her ambitions and a suggestion of the risks that they carry. We are promised that if we come along, we will receive much more than the simple story of what will happen to Dorothea Brooke. The lure is those hands and wrists of hers, set off by her
plain sleeves. We are given just enough material to begin to imagine her in a place and situation, and the invitation to follow her is beguiling and suggestive enough that we, like many former generations of the reading “we,” are inclined to accept.

More than any other aspect of storytelling, the successful rendering of characters depends on the reader. The goal is to get characters off the page and into the reader’s imagination. When this happens, transport follows. We readers travel in our chairs, beds, sofas, our living rooms, our carrels in the library, to a place in our minds where we aren’t quite aware that we are reading, where we wish we were like the protagonists or we say to ourselves, “Oh, God, that could be me,” where we speak to the characters—“No! Don’t do that!”—just as if those people were really here with us right now.

One might say this feat was easier in George Eliot’s time than it is today, when many other storytelling media can do the imagining for us. But they thus limit the range of possibilities—one reason that good books rarely get turned into good movies; the Captain Ahab we imagine when we read
Moby Dick
probably doesn’t look exactly like the Ahab any other reader imagines, and he certainly doesn’t look like Gregory Peck. When it comes to creating the illusion of human beings in stories, writers of fiction and nonfiction still have the distinctive and necessary task of getting the reader to do the necessary work of imagining.

Some general truths apply. For instance, one sure way to lose the reader is trying to get down everything you know about a person. What the imaginative reader wants is telling details. Characters can emerge in long descriptive passages, as in Tolstoy, but brevity can also work. Graham Greene rarely gives us
more than a detail or two—a face “charred with a three days’ beard” or a pair of “bald pink knees”—and Jane Austen often gives us less than that, and yet the people those writers create have come alive for generations of readers.

Whether it is brief or lengthy, mere description won’t vivify a statue. What we want are essences, woven into a story in moments large and small. A character has a wart. You could describe it in detail, but the reader would probably see it more clearly if you described not the wart but how the character covers it when he’s nervous.

Or take the small matter of a character’s age. It’s a bad idea, categorically bad, to offer it via a tired pretext: “She looked a decade younger than her seventy years.” Nor do you want to tack her age onto her name, as in a news story. Instead, think of a character’s age not as an obligatory but as a potentially significant fact. Wait for the moment when we need to know her age in order to understand an event in the story. Or, if her age has no narrative importance, slip us the number quietly at the moment when, if you were reading, you would need it for the picture of the woman that is forming in your mind.

There are multiple ways of presenting characters. Some people will go a long way toward defining themselves through their own speech. Others may talk volubly but without revealing much. In all cases, diligent reporting produces more quoted material than a book or article can hold. Selection is necessary, and, a more delicate matter, authorial management. Take for instance a character who talks so colorfully that the writer has to acknowledge the fact, as in
The Earl of Louisiana
, A. J. Liebling’s extended profile of the flamboyant governor Earl Long. At one
point, Liebling recounts a campaign speech in which the governor tells a crowd that a political opponent wears expensive suits, then says of himself: “A four-hundred-dollar suit on old Uncle Earl would look like socks on a rooster.” Liebling breaks in:

An author can also rely on others to comment for him. Liebling spends most of the first four chapters of
The Earl
relating others’ stories and opinions of the governor. Point of view is a powerful tool for making people materialize in our imaginations. Characters who seem lifeless at the end of a draft can sometimes be revived by letting the reader see them through another set of eyes, or several sets of eyes, as in Liebling. Minor characters encountered in the flow of a story can function as lenses on the main characters. Minor characters can also serve as foils, the human background against which we see the main characters more clearly.

A minor character can also become a liability. Sometimes in a draft, a minor character grows dimensions and threatens to wreck the narrative scheme. It is assumed that something like this happened to Shakespeare. In
Will in the World
, his book about Shakespeare’s life and times, Stephen Greenblatt writes: “… in an anecdote that circulated in the seventeenth century, [Shakespeare] is said to have remarked of
Romeo and Juliet
that
he had in the third act to kill Mercutio—the wildly anarchic mocker of romantic love—before Mercutio killed him.” Probably every serious writer, in nonfiction and fiction, has had the experience of seeing a minor character grow so vivid as to seem more important or at least more interesting than the principals of the story. It’s a better kind of problem than many. Such characters are always hard to give up, but they are often diagnostic: maybe you haven’t worked hard enough on the main characters, or maybe that minor character ought to be major, and if so, maybe you should ask yourself if there is something wrong with the point of view or the structure of your story.

Some minor characters who remain minor are, as E. M. Forster puts it, “flat,” known in one dimension only. The type is abundant in Shakespeare’s plays and in any work that includes a wide cast. Flat characters are part of the glory of Charles Dickens. The dinner guest Twemlow in
Our Mutual Friend
is an extreme example of flatness, known mainly by his resemblance to a table:

Whether flat or multidimensional, minor or central, characters need settings in order to live. A setting can be an actual place, but it is always more than that. Above all, a setting tells what is at issue—what a character is trying to do, what a character fears or is trying to hide, hopes to gain or stands to lose, what a character is up against. Depicting such circumstances and feelings is one way you can get the reader imaginatively involved; something matters to this person on the page, and we can imagine its mattering to us.

Sometimes what’s at stake, as in a narrative of revelation, is the author’s own quest to discover a character’s identity. The challenge implicit in all biographical writing is made explicit in these cases. In
Joe Gould’s Secret
, for example, we accompany Joseph Mitchell in getting to know an outlandish Harvard-educated bum and in ultimately discovering the poignant lie by which the man has lived. A. J. Liebling’s essay “Quest for Mollie,” less well known but no less beguiling, begins with Liebling in the role of war correspondent reporting from North Africa. He comes upon the body of a young American enlisted man and hears stories about him from other soldiers: the daring, wildly eccentric “Mollie” supposedly captured an entire regiment, six hundred Italian soldiers, single-handedly. We return to New York with Liebling and accompany him on his further search for Mollie’s identity, or identities.

•

Many well-wrought characters live in nonfiction, but the library of fictional characters is much larger. Nonfiction writers
spend useful time there, trying to figure out what they can borrow and, equally important, what they can’t.

When we read fictional and factual narratives, we conjure up characters through their deeds: characteristic actions and contradictory actions, behavior in moments of stress, of mastery, of weakness. Suggestions of a character’s motives may be implicit in the deeds, but many readers want more. We want to imagine that we know why characters do what they do and feel as they do. We want to understand characters in a story better than we understand ourselves. This, of course, is an illusion available only in fiction. The writer of factual stories is constrained by what the subject is willing and able to reveal.

Fiction writers tell us that sometimes their imagined characters seem to take over, to grow and change on the page, acquiring unexpected qualities and doing unexpected things, just as if they were alive. Fiction writers can invent ways out of whatever problems this creates; if necessary, they can always kill off the character in the midst of the story, as Shakespeare did Mercutio. Nonfiction storytellers don’t have that option.

In nonfiction, events and characters stand in paradoxical relation to each other. There is a fundamental difference between writing about a man who gets into an accident and writing about the accident. The event is the event. It happened. It’s a fact. As for the man, no one knows for sure who he really is, what skein of motives and desires led him to this event. And yet he, not the accident, is your fixed star. Once you have selected a person to write about, that person has become the central mystery you want to solve, knowing that you never will solve it completely.

In your research, you spend all the time and perspicacity you can muster on that man. Eventually, you grasp a vision of him in the round, a vision that honors his variousness. Then you try to re-create that vision in writing, presenting him through things you’ve seen him do, things you’ve heard him say, things you’ve heard others say about him. You choose those things from among many candidates in your notes, selecting them partly because they seem interesting or colorful or funny in themselves, but mainly because they express your vision of the character. It may be that when you met him, the man thought of his accident as the most important thing in his life. But suppose nothing about the accident enhances or complicates or expresses your sense of who he is. You can’t invent another, more revealing accident for him to be in, but you can choose
not
to write about the real one. The honest nonfiction storyteller is a restrained illusionist.