Welcome to Our Country: Four Men Toss Around the Nonfiction Football

As late as the 1990s, literary nonfiction was in a kind of eclipse, practically blacklisted from academia and literary journals. Poets and Writers would list prizes in fiction and poetry—but not the essay. Critics launched attacks on memoir as self-indulgent, personal pseudo-historicism from the high pulpits of Vanity Fair and the New York Times.

But that was last century. Now there are nonfiction MFA degrees, literary journals that specialize in nonfiction, essay contests listed in Poets and Writers, memoirs and personal essays on best-sellers lists, and a plethora of anthologies and textbooks on the essay and memoir. These four new books add to the growing canon with a twist. Each writer, who is also a teacher and editor, offers himself as personal mentor to the reader.

This approach depends upon the illusion of an individual relationship: writer as mentor, speaking directly to the reader, his sole apprentice. It’s the kind of intimacy characteristic of the personal essay from the time of Montaigne, and the trait Virginia Woolf, writing in “The Modern Essay,” considered its defining quality: “A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out” (222).

There is a distinct “meta-nonfictional” challenge involved in crafting the persona of a craft book. You are teaching the reader how to craft a self by crafting a pedagogically convincing self of your own. The effectiveness of the book depends not only upon the information provided but also the effective illusion of intimacy formed by the nature of the persona, at minimum a knowledgeable, approachable, and trustworthy person. Even in a perfect literary world, creating such a persona would be challenging. But while literary nonfiction may be thriving in academic and public circles, it remains contentious territory. There is still widespread disagreement over what makes it “literary” as well as what terminology will signal its literariness, and the somnambulistic myth persists suggesting that it has no history, and instead that it sprung up out of thin air as another manifestation of the post-WWII generation’s preoccupation with the self.

In such a fraught environment, even writers of how-to books on nonfiction must pledge allegiance to a particular predetermined territory, and even the basic, seemingly simple acts of deciding on terminology and defining the genre have become the theoreticians’ equivalent of a circular firing squad where everyone has a bull’s-eye painted on the front of his J. Crew button-down. Whether overtly, arguing with other writers and analyzing the state of the genre, or more subtly, through the lexis they use and writers they cite, these four books expand the circle.

Phillip Lopate confronts these matters head-on in his latest book, To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction: “In a sense, I am defending here the historical prerogatives of the literary nonfiction form, to charm and entice by way of a voice that can speak in more than one register, that can tell an anecdote, be self-mocking and serious by turns, and analyze a conundrum. My deepest inclination as a writer is historical: to link up what is written today with the rich literary lode of the past” (vii–ix). That focus on history will come as no surprise to readers of his 1994 book, The Art of the...