THE FINE ART OF LITERARY FIST-FIGHTING

An in-the-trenches view of the birth and growth of creative nonfiction.

Although he admits to being a motorcycle-riding outsider without many academic credentials and plenty of opinions, Gutkind, author of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, promises a little more mayhem with his title than he delivers. Sure, he has an elephant graveyard’s worth of bones to pick with some writers—John D’Agata, keep your eyes peeled—and he admires a few brawling writers (Hemingway, Mailer). The fist-fighting he mentions is of a more genteel kind, however: the sniffy dismissals of creative nonfiction as “bullshit,” in the words of one New York Times Book Review editor, who added, “I don’t know what it is other than people making stuff up.” Gutkind’s definition is more circumstantial. Though the genre allows for some embroidering, creative nonfiction is a more or less factual way of detailing the episodes (“writing in scenes”) that make up people’s lives, whether one’s own or another’s. In this, creative nonfiction owes broadly to the new journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, with exponents such as Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. Gutkind sagely notes that this broad leeway has allowed for women and members of ethnic and social minorities to forge ahead somewhat more fully than in other fields. Among his most admired exemplars is Joan Didion, who “labored over each sentence, establishing an intimacy with her voice that would sustain her work and inspire readers and writers far longer than most of the other new journalists,” and James Baldwin, whose essays of the 1950s perhaps prefigured new journalism. Whatever the case, this memoir/critical history will please some readers and tick off others, which seems to be precisely the point.

Budding journalists and students of creative writing will find plenty of red meat in Gutkind’s pages.