Truth and lies...

Today's Slate has a review of Tobias Wolff's new short story collection, the main theme of which is lying. Anyone who has read This Boy's Life (made into a heart-stopping movie with Robert DeNiro) or his brother's book, The Duke of Deception, will understand Wolff's obsession. He was raised by both talented and untalented fibbers, and quickly learned to lie himself, to survive and escape. Now, as a fiction writer, he's engaged in a peculiar mirror act: telling the lie that tells the truth.

The first building block of art is believability. Stories about either fairies, dragons, or Horton and The Who must first be convincing dragons, fairies, Hortons, and Whos. Otherwise you'd quit reading and paint your toenails instead. When a story is crappy, the first refuge of students, fools, and frauds to bleat that it really, really happened. To that particular whine, you can only mutter, I don't care.

Caring is the point. Good art, like a talented lover, is out to steal your heart.

Alice In Wonderland still draws us in and leaves us with the sense that we know Alice the way we know our closest friend or dearest sister. Ditto for Jane Austin's Emma. On the other hand, we remain indifferent to whomever gets bloodily slaughtered in I Spit On Your Grave.

Watching the HBO John Adams mini-series, I've been reminded of all the reasons I love the 18th century. It was the first century to value comfort and privacy, no matter how frostbitten the John Adams cast looks at times. Luckily for us as Americans, it was also a period that valued clear thinking.

Back then, about the arts of any type, people made a useful distinction between fantasy and imagination. The word fantasy described works that were not based on the factual world, and whose events or characters could not possibly exist. Think of: vampires, unicorns, and unkillable teenagers in hockey masks.

The word imagination was reserved for those works, whose people, actions and events seemed possible. So although Alice drops down a hole in pursuit of an enormous rabbit wearing a business suit, and winds up having conversations with eggs and playing cards, the entire story seems utterly logical. And Alice, as a character, assumes her rightful place as one of the most realistic and tough-minded heroines in literature.

This weekend, hearing that I was a writer, my neighbor asked if I wrote those big, fat,
chunky best-sellers, the kind you see in drugstores and airports.
"Nope", I said. "I don't know enough about serial killers or nuclear weapon-systems."

The real truth is that I don't like fantasy. I'll take imagination any day...any day of the ordinary work-a-day week.