JOE McGINNISS

This question has been around about as long as the chicken and the egg. Or at least since I started in journalism. In its newest iteration, there’s a suggestion that all depends on who is laying the egg.

If David Foster Wallace makes up quotes in a piece that purports to be nonfiction, hats off! He’s only doing it get to to a deeper level of truth.

But if Joe McGinniss does it, god forbid! Off with his fingertips!

By the way, I don’t.

On Salon.com, in regard to Wallace fudging quotes in his piece about his experience of taking a cruise, (“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”), Daniel B. Roberts says, “…if altering dialogue served to better crystalize and define that experience, then it’s still truthful, no matter what David Remnick or his fact-checkers would say.”

So if you’re a fiction writer dabbling in journalism and calling the result an
“essay,” then “massaging the facts” (Roberts’s term for what Wallace did in his nonfiction) is okay. Roberts writes, “…the idea that Wallace’s occasional use of invented dialogue makes him, by definition, not a journalist, is a laughable one.”

Pardon me for laughing.

Does anyone remember the brouhaha in 1984 when New Yorker writer Alastair Reid said he routinely (as Maureen Down reported in the New York Times) “invented characters, rearranged events and composed conversations in search of ‘a larger reality.'”)?

At the time, Reid told Joanne Lipman, then a Wall Street Journal reporter, “Some people write very factually. I don’t…Facts are only a part of reality…You have to get over this hump that it’s fact or else. There is a truth that is harder to get at…than the truth yielded by fact.”

Reid and The New Yorker were roundly pilloried.

Now David Foster Wallace (of whose genius I stand in awe) is celebrated for doing the same thing.

Does this show a decline in our perception of journalistic standards, or merely the decline of hypocrisy in regard to same?

I’d have a much easier time reporting and writing my next book, 15 GOTHIC STREET, if I fabricated the quotes and stretched the facts to suit my narrative needs.

But I’ve never done that, and I’m too old to learn new tricks now.