The line between fact and fiction has always been fairly thin and indistinct. One reason is that remembering is at least partially a creative act. Rather than retrieving an accurate mental replica of a person or event, we tend to reconstruct a memory from fragments, filling in the blanks with our imagination, often without even realizing it.
The other reason is that people, especially good storytellers, tend to embellish a tale to heighten its drama, entertain their audiences or aggrandize themselves. In a time when it has become almost routine to discover the lies of corporate executives, journalists, police — even presidents — it's worth exploring our notions of truth, and examining the intersection of fact and fiction.
Several books that have crossed my desk recently blend fantasy and reality in very different ways.
The Truth Hurts;
Satire Heals Tim Dorsey's new novel, Cadillac Beach, is satirical fiction that makes mad, wonderful fun of real-life situations and people, including CIA operatives, right-wing Miami Cuban exile conspirators and potheads.
Dorsey's lovable and entertaining psychotic antihero Serge Storms is back in Dorsey's best book yet, and this time he's on a mission to solve the mystery of his grandfather's death; cripple the Mob in south Florida; publicly embarrass Castro; help the chamber of commerce with its image crisis; restore respect for the U.S. intelligence community, and lure the Today Show to Miami, among many other things.
I won't tell you if he succeeds, but I will tell you that he plans to do it all through his business, Serge & Lenny's Florida Experience. It features gonzo tours of historic sites such as the gym where Muhammad Ali trained when he was still Cassius Clay, the club where the Beatles hung out when they visited the U.S. in 1964, and the room at the Eden Roc where Lucy and Ricky stayed on vacation in an I Love Lucy episode.
These are real places where real things really happened. All of Dorsey's books are filled with such sites and with more accurate and well-researched facts than some nonfiction books. That's partly due to his background as a journalist, partly to his own Serge-like passion for Florida trivia. Readers get an education in Florida history (albeit some of it weird, pop culture history) without even knowing it. We think we're just having fun, but we're actually learning something. The book is scheduled for release Feb. 3, and Dorsey will appear at 6 p.m. Feb. 6 at Inkwood Books, 216 S. Armenia Ave. in Tampa; 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 7 at Circle Books, 478 John Ringling Blvd. in Sarasota; 4 p.m. Monday, Feb. 9 at Haslam's Book Store, 2025 Central Ave. in St. Pete.
Neo New Journalism At the other end of the spectrum are works presented as factual accounts made more dramatic or entertaining through the use of fiction-writing techniques. Biographers and pop historians have long employed such methods. Tom Wolfe applied the idea to writing articles, and The New Journalism was born. (There's also Internet reporting, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.)
Now we have a further twist: the roman quête, defined by its inventor as part investigative journalism, part novel. The first roman quête, the book Who Killed Daniel Pearl, was written by Bernard-Henri Levy, a dashing French philosopher/artist/ journalist/diplomat, and published by iconoclastic upstart Melville House. It's a fascinating, sometimes hair-raising page-turner in which the hero/author quests to find Pearl's murderers. As a philosopher and diplomat, Levy has a flexible relationship to truth. During his investigation, he lies to people about what he's doing, and they lie to him about what they know. Then he writes a book about his adventure, freely admitting that he filled in gaps of knowledge with his imagination. Levy approaches truth as a precious but unreliable commodity to be hidden sometimes, bartered or used as a bludgeon at other times, and never entirely to be trusted. The New History: Getting Stoned Then there's historical fiction, which used to mean made-up stories set in historically accurate surroundings. Historical novelists are famous for their prodigious research, sometimes displaying it to tiresome degree with long passages of endless, unnecessary details. However, historical accuracy is harder to achieve on stage and in film, and Nilo Cruz is not the first writer to manipulate historic fact in the service of drama. He is, however, the first to do it in a Pulitzer prize-winning play set in Ybor City. The script, Anna in the Tropics, will be featured in the library's "One Community One Book" program in March, and the playwright will visit Tampa. It's a great choice, certain to generate plenty of interest and conversation. I'm curious about what Tampans will think about the liberties he has taken with our history. Has Ybor City been Oliver Stoned? Pick up a copy of the play at the library and let me know what you think.
In the meantime, I'm sticking with what I can remember of an old adage I heard somewhere: Believe nothing of what you hear, part of what you read and a little bit more of what you see. Or something like that.
Contributing Editor Susan F. Edwards can be reached at susan.edwards15 @verizon.net.
This article appears in Jan 1-7, 2004.
