In the Details

The Lifespan of a Fact, by John

DAgata and Jim Fingal
By JENNIFER B. McDONALDFEB. 21, 2012

This book review would be so much easier to write were we to play by John
DAgatas rules. So lets try it. (1) This is not a book review; its an essay. (2) Im not a
critic; Im an artist. (3) Nothing I say can be used against me by the subjects of this
essay, nor may anyone hold me to account re facts, truth or any contract I have
supposedly entered into with you, the reader. There are to be no objections. There
are to be no letters of complaint. For you are about to have are you ready? a
genuine experience with art.

This is so liberating!

Riff: The Fact-Checker Versus the Fabulist
FEB. 21, 2012

Under consideration in this essay is The Lifespan of a Fact, which is less a book
than a knock-down, drag-out fight between two tenacious combatants, over
questions of truth, belief, history, myth, memory and forgetting. In one corner is Jim
Fingal, who as an intern for the literary magazine The Believer in 2005 (or it might
have been 2003 sources disagree) signed on for what he must have thought
would be a straightforward task: fact-checking a 15-page article. In the other corner
is DAgata, who thought he had made a deal with The Believer to publish not just an
article but a work of Art an essay already rejected by Harpers Magazine because
of factual inaccuracies that would find its way to print unmolested by any
challenge to its veracity. Lifespan is the scorecard from their bout, a reproduction
of their correspondence over the course of five (or was it seven?) years of fact-
checking.

The book presents, line by line, DAgatas original essay, as well as Fingals
staggeringly meticulous annotations. The essay, finally published in 2010 and
threaded into DAgatas book About a Mountain, tells the story of a boy named Levi
Presley who in 2002 jumped to his death from the observation deck of the
Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas. DAgata used that episode to meditate on ideas
about, among other things, suicide and Las Vegas, the stories Vegas tells about itself,
the stories visitors tell themselves about Vegas, and what a city built on artifice
might tell us about the human condition.

You dont want to come in contact with reality when youre here for a fantasy,
DAgata quotes a Nevada state senator as saying. Lifespan flips that platitude on its
head and asks: Do we want to come in contact with fantasy when were here for
reality?

From DAgatas first sentence, which says that at the time of Levis death there were
34 licensed strip clubs in Vegas, Fingal detects trouble. DAgata has supplied The
Believer with a source suggesting the city had just 31 such clubs. Fingal asks DAgata
how he arrived at 34. DAgata replies in dubious fashion: Because the rhythm of
34 works better in that sentence than the rhythm of 31.

The discrepancies mount. The Boston Saloon becomes the Bucket of Blood
because Bucket of Blood is more interesting. The name of Levis school is
changed because the original is too clunky. It has a comma in it; thats ridiculous.
Tweety Nails becomes Famous Nails a real mystery, for with a too-good-to-
be-true name like Tweety Nails, why tweak it? A fleet of dog-grooming vans
described in DAgatas notes as pink become purple, because I needed the two
beats in purple.

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Minor fibs? Maybe. But other fabrications are decidedly not. Another suicide-by-fall
that occurred on the same day as Levis is transformed into a suicide-by-hanging,

because I wanted Levis death to be the only one from falling that day. I wanted his
death to be more unique.

If you fancy yourself a member of the reality-based community, here is where you
might start feeling twitchy. Fingal certainly did. You are writing what will probably
become the de facto story of what happened to Levi, he reminds DAgata. Dont
you think that the gravity of the situation demands an accuracy that youre
dismissing as incidental?

No, DAgata argues. His duty is not to accuracy, nor to Levi. His duty is to Truth. And
when an artist works in service of Truth, fidelity to fact is irrelevant. So too is any
sense of professional decency, it seems. Fingal approaches his task honorably and
deferentially. Im new at this, so bear with me, he tells DAgata. But for having the
audacity to do his job, he is subjected to a steady walloping of obscenity and
condescension. DAgata accuses Fingal of ruining this essay with nit-picking. He
repeatedly calls Fingal stupid (and worse). Its telling that in the heat of battle
DAgata resorts to playground taunts. When a dirty fighter realizes he has no legs
left, he aims low.

Perhaps by now youre asking, Who does this DAgata think he is? For one, he is a
writing teacher at the University of Iowa. He is also a self-appointed ambassador of
the essay, a literary form he feels has for too long been terrorized by an
unsophisticated reading public. He is quick to tell you hes not a journalist (and

thats a fact). He is also, he explains, not running for office (thank goodness, although
Im sure hed be great at it).

DAgata asserts he didnt report his essay from Vegas; he went to the city and did a
little mind-meld with it. This, even though his techniques look suspiciously like
those of a reporter: he immersed himself in a place, got to know its people,
consulted documents, recorded his impressions, turned his material into a narrative.
Not only that, but he loaded his essay with factually verifiable detail dates, times,
dimensions, directions, statistics, names, quotations from actual journalistic sources.
He declares that as an essayist he shouldnt be held to the same standards of
correctness as a journalist. So fine, hes not a journalist. Hes a wolf in journalists
clothing.

His position, however, raises a question: Isnt blowing off facts as if they were so
much dandelion fluff antithetical to his stated purpose of essaying the Truth?
DAgata uses facts that arent facts to make a statement about a reality that is
real for no one but himself, and relies on coincidences that arent coincidences to
reveal something profound about Las Vegas, or the cosmos, that is not profound
but rather an accidental accumulation of detail and event. He argues that in
manipulating Levis story, hes making a better work of art and thus a better and
truer experience for the reader. But would it have made the experience any less
True to call those vans pink? To let Tweety Nails be Tweety Nails? To give that poor
school its comma?


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I try to take control of something before it is lost entirely to chaos, DAgata writes,
but what he creates is a mirage. He takes randomness and superimposes themes,
gins up drama where it doesnt exist, tries to convince us his embellishments are
more vivid and revealing about a city, about human nature, about Truth, than reality
could ever be.

In short, he plays God. (Recall: I wanted his death to be more unique.) But one
could contend hes merely making excuses to conceal his own laziness. As Fingal
says: Ars longa, vita brevis, no? Why not suck it up and do the work to get it right?

DAgatas attachment to his precious words might be less exasperating were his
defenses not so frequently flimsy. On one page, he changes the name of Levis tae
kwon do school because it doesnt contain the term tae kwon do, which could
suggest that someone wouldnt be able to study tae kwon do there and thus cause
unnecessary confusion. (By this logic, the West Bronx Academy for the Future, in
New York, must not include history in its curriculum.) On another page, he defends
his inventions, assuming a tone of righteous indignation: Do you think Id just
change this willy-nilly to suit some sort of literary trick I wanted to pull off? Um.
Yes!

Two more DAgatian principles, both outrageous, cannot go unmentioned. First is

his notion about what writing branded non-fiction can and cannot do.
Non-fiction, he has argued, essentially means not art, since the word fiction is
derived from the Latin fictio, which itself means to form, to shape, to arrange a
pretty fundamental activity in art. So by calling something non-fiction you are
saddling the genre with a label that means its incapable of doing what art is
fundamentally supposed to do.

To be sure, nonfiction is an inadequate term. And respected writers working in
forms categorized as nonfiction have been massaging facts for centuries. But in
many cases, these writers reputations have preceded them. And where not, those
who change names or collapse time for narrative effect, and who care about their
readers trust, know to disclose their adjustments up front.

DAgatas rejection of nonfiction still fails to support his conviction that fact and
art are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, his implication that something calling itself
nonfiction and trying to hew to fact cannot also rise to the level of literature is at
the least confounding and at worst insulting to some of our finest writers.

Superb literary artists have managed to do their work while remaining precise
about details DAgata would dismiss as frivolous. What of Updikes criticism and E.
B. Whites essays and Joan Didions sociopolitical dispatches? More recently, what of
the narrative journalism of Katherine Boo, Elif Batuman and Philip Gourevitch, or

the essays and criticism of Jonathan Franzen, Pankaj Mishra and Zadie Smith? What
of John McPhee, who three years ago in The New Yorker went so far as to write a
lengthy ode to his fact checkers? Would DAgata claim that these writers adherence
to fact diminishes their art? That when working in nonfiction, they dont weigh the
same ingredients he does structure, theme, resonance, rhythm in order to
wring something wondrous from the ordinary?

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No text is sacred. The best writers know this. Fiction or nonfiction, poetry or
reportage, it can all be endlessly tinkered with, buffed, polished, reshaped,
rearranged. To create art out of fact, to be flexible and canny enough to elicit
something sublime from an inconvenient detail, is itself an art. For DAgata to argue
otherwise to insist that fact impedes the possibilities of literature, and that
anyone who thinks otherwise is unsophisticated betrays his limitations as a
researcher and a writer, not our limitations as readers.

The Believer didnt let DAgata get away with everything, but its editors did let slide
quite a lot. (To compare versions of his essay, youll have to request a back issue
Lifespan doesnt include the finished work, which seems a missed opportunity.)
Details disproved in Life-span appear unchanged in the magazine. This makes for a
surreal reading experience, as if history were slipping away before our eyes in a

real-time enactment of Orwells observation: The very concept of objective truth is

fading out of the world. . . . Lies will pass into history.

This brings us to DAgatas other outrageous proposition that one neednt
concern oneself with facts because rarely are facts reliable, and that belief alone
should be considered as muscular as fact, even when the belief has been proved to
be based on invention. As long as a story is believed by somebody, he writes, I
consider it a legitimate potential history. Hogwash.

All storytelling is a form of manipulation, and all narrative may be subjective. But as
Fingal notes, Just because youre open to new interpretations doesnt mean that all
interpretations are valid. In publishing DAgatas essay without tipping off readers
to his modus operandi, The Believer which in its submission guidelines for
writers explicitly says: Please do not send fiction invites us down a slippery
slope. For as soon as any detail can be called arbitrary, what faith are we to put in
words at all? Suddenly there is no difference between essaying the Truth and
essaying Truthiness.

DAgata would say slapping a disclaimer on his writing is akin to spoon-feeding an
infantile audience afraid of accidentally venturing into terrain that cant be
footnoted and verified. Hed argue that people who have read his work (though
how many is that, really?) should understand what theyre getting into the moment
they see his byline. Hed say that if you make it through his essay, youll grasp what

hes been building to all along: At some point it came clear . . . that if I point to
something seeming like significance there is the possibility that nothing real is there.
Sometimes we misplace knowledge in pursuit of information. Sometimes our
wisdom, too, in pursuit of whats called knowledge. He would call this the essays
great revelation. I would call it too facile, too late.

But lets conclude on a positive note. Im happy to report that if appearances are to
be believed, DAgata and Fingal didnt kill each other at the end of those however-
many years. They are shown together in a photograph on the back of this book. I
suppose Photoshop could have achieved this trick, but the image implies that Fingal
still walks among us. The galleys for the book had described him as a writer; now,
we are told, he designs software. But in case he is writing, I have a very important
message for him: Stay true, young Jim. Stay true.