What the Novelist Can Do That the Historian Cannot

 A lot to ponder from  Jonathan Lee and David Goodwillie Rethink the New York Origin Story:

GOODWILLIE: Why did you decide to tell his story fictionally? What can a novel achieve that a biography can’t?

LEE: At first, I thought I might write a biography. When I was in the archives taking notes, that’s what I was intending to do. There were certain years where I could find loads of information, but other years were complete blanks, where I had almost no sense of what happened to him. And it just seemed, in the end, that that was all tied up with why he’d been forgotten, and also why a biography wouldn’t necessarily work. I was trying so hard to find the beat-by-beat events of his life, and they just weren’t out there. And when the gaps are bigger than the facts, a sort of empathetic imagining is needed.

GOODWILLIE: And as a novelist, you get to fill in those blanks however you want. But there’s still a real life story you have to adhere to some degree. It must be like writing a memoir in a way, in that the art comes as much from what you leave out as what you put in. You become the arbiter of your subject’s life, except you’re not necessarily highlighting the major moments of that life, but instead the moments that fit the story you’ve chosen to tell.

LEE: That’s right. And the choosing is really fascinating, because the absences can sometimes become more vivid than the presences. For example, I don’t have a chapter where Green is mourning the death of his father. But by having a scene where they build a sheep pen together—which I could base on anecdotes he’d written—I think the reader can imagine what his father’s death must have felt like to him regardless.

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GOODWILLIE: I get this question a lot: What is the definition of literature? And one of my answers would be that literature focuses on the smaller moments in life. Whereas more commercial books will always focus on the bigger ones. The louder ones. That’s where the commercial writer’s mind goes. Whereas the literary writer toils in…not the minutia, exactly, but the interior, the personal, the moments that may be just as life defining but from the outside might look small, even inconsequential. Clearly in this book you made that choice again and again, and it works wonderfully because by the end you have a picture of a man that you wouldn’t necessarily have were he sitting there receiving awards and validation.

But I agree with it all.