Private in Public

The man they call the godfather of CNF, Lee Gutkind, wrote that the genre is characterised by the union of public and private stories. Right away, this had me thinking of my own favourite writer, David Foster Wallace (whose name you’ll probably have to deal with regular invocations of if you stick with this blog). Wallace’s CNF, published in magazines from Harper’s to Rolling Stone and shared widely online, built a large base of devoted fans. I believe the primary appeal of these pieces is Wallace’s own energetic presence in the stories, his personal mental rhythms and responses captured on the page. Whether he’s describing a U.S. porn industry conference (“Big Red Son”) or reviewing an academic Dostoyevsky biography (“Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky”), Wallace always keeps himself out in front, close to the core of every story. This works because his writing voice—witty, hyper-intelligent, sometimes neurotic—is captivating.  But I think the real strength of Wallace’s CNF is that it is never just about Wallace; it is his personal interaction with big, public stories. The private individual in the public story, or the public implications of the individual story.

            “The View from Mrs Thompson’s” is the Wallace piece that popped into my head when I read the Gutkind statement. It is a memoir-style account of Wallace’s life in the week following the September 11 attacks. It is both deeply personal—telling, for example, of Wallace’s breaking down while trying to buy himself a U.S. flag—and highly relevant to public thought on the events. Its final sentence typifies what I see as the combination of the private, emotional story, and the broader public comment that makes great CNF:

“I’m trying, rather, to explain how some part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America … than it was these ladies’.”

Forgive me quoting this entirely out of context, I hope it still makes some sense. Mostly, I hope you’ll go and read the story. It’s in the collection Consider the Lobster (as are the other articles I’ve mentioned) or you can see it here in kind of messy form.

I found "The View from Mrs Thompson's" both deeply moving and highly thought-provoking. This, I would suggest, is the whole point of Gutkind’s parallel narratives. CNF like this makes public issues personal; it helps us to feel what they might really mean.