Lifespan of a Fact

Once I discovered John D’Agata’s new book, The Lifespan of a Fact, I had high hopes that he would recant, or at least evolve, his views on fact and fiction and their place in literary essays. I can’t imagine that, given his blithe disregard for facts, D’Agata would have gotten nearly the regard he has so far if not for his clear gifts with prose. Thus my hopes, that a talented writer would give up—or at least productively question—his vision of essay-writing as resting on a foundation of truthiness that I find highly disagreeable.

Alas, this seems not to be the case.

His position, however, raises a question: Isn’t blowing off facts as if they were so much dandelion fluff antithetical to his stated purpose of essaying the Truth? D’Agata uses “facts” that aren’t facts to make a statement about a “reality” that is real for no one but himself, and relies on “coincidences” that aren’t 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 Levi’s story, he’s “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?

“I try to take control of something before it is lost entirely to chaos,” D’Agata writes, but what he creates is a mirage. He takes randomness and superimposes themes, gins up drama where it doesn’t 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 he’s 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?”

D’Agata’s attachment to his precious words might be less exasperating were his defenses not so frequently flimsy. On one page, he changes the name of Levi’s tae kwon do school because it doesn’t contain the term “tae kwon do,” which could “suggest that someone wouldn’t 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 I’d just change this willy-nilly to suit some sort of literary trick I wanted to pull off?” Um. Yes!

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