Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe ed. by Michael Lackey (review)

A goldmine for biofiction researchers through its conceptual density and the vividness of its dialogues, Conversations with Biographical Novelists is also a great source of insight into the working strategies of numerous acclaimed contemporary authors from various countries, including the recent Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk. The interviews tackle specific contemporary issues like the porous boundary between historical and literary discourse and the limits of writerly responsibility, without shying away from the broader questions undergirding them, such as the meaning of writing and making sense of the world in the twenty-first century.

In Michael Lackey's first volume of interviews with biographical novelists (Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists), Julia Alvarez quotes Joseph Conrad's definition of art as "bringing to light the truth, manifold and one" to explain the distinction between traditional biographies and biographical fictions. The novel, she adds, brings to its readers "the feel of the texture of reality"; it helps not simply to understand the past, but "to understand the experience of being alive in the past" (30). In the same volume, Michael Cunningham confesses that he doesn't see "a particularly clear or easily-drawn line between fact and fiction" (90), since experience inevitably informs fictions, whereas expectations and beliefs inform our perception and our accounts of facts. These thoughts are also at the core of the second volume of interviews edited by Lackey (this time in collaboration with other scholars, including Bethany Layne and Virginia Rademacher). Yet, while the approach of the first book was more exploratory, this new volume, preceded by Lackey's more theoretical books on biofiction (The American Biographical Novel and the edited volume Biofictional Histories, Mutations, and Forms), comes with a stronger conceptual scaffolding, aiming to explain the contemporary boom in biofictions (novels and stories that name their protagonist after a real historical figure), and more importantly, what specific accomplishments distinguish this type of fiction from other contemporary lifewriting genres.

One of the main aspirations of the flourishing new hybrid—neither biography nor traditional historical fiction—is, in Hannah Kent's words, to "interrogate the idea of a single truth" (108). Coming from different angles and often answering differently pitched questions, most of the respondents converge in defining the truth they are depicting as multiple, "heterogeneous," according to Hannah Kent (108), or "polyvalent," in the words of Javier Cercas (55). Some, like Laurent Binet, even refuse to speak about truth—"a big word with too many meanings" (38)—preferring to delineate between "veracity" ("the truth of facts") and the literary recontextualization provided by novels. Critical of the wholesale dismissal of truth, which he diagnoses as "literary dandyism" (39), Binet underlines the importance of tapping into a "deeper and more thought-provoking" version of postmodernism. In tune with this return to historically-rooted forms of literature, Colm Tóibín speaks of the "anchor" (231) that facts supply and Colum McCann of the necessity "to ground the truth somehow" (135), even when some facts are altered. The reliance on facts, partial as it may be, provides a rediscovered "gravitas" (17), as Michael Lackey describes it in his introduction, thanks to which we can conceive of strategies to overcome the dissolution of meanings while preserving the multiper-spectival advantages of the postmodern framework.

If biofiction offers alternative truths, these are not always opposed to the narrative a historian or biographer would provide, nor always overlapping with it. In some cases, writers' intuitions are confirmed later by factual or documentary discoveries, or by interviews with the prototypes of their characters (examples include works by Barbara Chase-Riboud, Colum McCann, and Anchee Min). This is, nonetheless, just one side of the coin, since many of the interviewees also write novels and stories in which fictional characters interact with life-based ones, or where very little is known about the prototype of a character. Chika Unigwe, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Emma Donoghue, Nuala O'Connor, and Hannah Kent talk about such borderline...