FALSE DOCUMENTS IN FICTION

"The truest thing in life is a lie well told." - MARK TWAIN

I’m just a humble motherfucker with a bigass dick. - GEORGE ORWELL

I. FALSE DOCUMENTS IN FICTION

Ever mindful of the length requirements of online writing these days, and ever fearful of the dreaded “tl;dr bro” comment, I thought I might try posting bite-sized bits of a longer post. But either because I suffer from hypergraphia or because I love false documents, this post is over 4000 words. Can’t say I didn’t warn ya.

This week’s topic is false documents. A false document is a literary device where a fabricated text like a letter, diary, film, or book, is presented as if it were real. False documents create a sense of believability in fiction. They are powerful tools, especially when the document within the story carries more authority, danger, or reverence than the story itself can claim directly.

When a book is about a book, the author can make the fictional book as funny or significant or respected or reviled or dangerous as they want. There are as many uses for fictional documents as contexts. False documents in novels like Mark Z Danielweski’s House of Leaves and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding are the most compelling part of the story. In movies like The Blair Witch Project and This Is Spinal Tap, the films themselves are the false documents, with no additional commentary or subtext.

And sometimes false documents are referenced instead of shown. The Key to All Mythologies in George Eliot’s Middlemarch is the pride and joy of Reverend Edward Casaubon, a pompous and ineffectual intellectual whose book is meant to advance a single, all-encompassing explanation for all existing mythologies, like a Grand Unified Theory for mythical literature. It has since come to mean any kind of doomed or deluded scholarly project. In 2021 Jonathan Franzen published the first novel in a forthcoming trilogy. The novel is called Crossroads and the trilogy is called The Key to All Mythologies. These examples (and scores of others) show that how and why a false document is used is up to the writer while the act of interpretation is up to the reader/viewer. Sometimes another writer references or even adopts a false document from another work, like Franzen did. Stephen King borrowed Robert Bloch’s De Vermis Mysteriis in his late career masterpiece Revival and dozens of horror writers have used H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.

I remember how delighted I was when Boys Night Out released a song called “I Got Punched in the Face For Sticking My Nose in Other People’s Business,” which references a scene in The Wedding Singer where Adam Sandler is punched and his assailant advises him to write a song with that title.

II. WONDER BOY

Michael Chabon burst on the literary scene at the age of twenty-four with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a coming-of-age tale set in the titular city. Having graduated from the University of Pittsburgh at twenty-two, Chabon enrolled in the Creative Writing program at the University of California, where he submitted The Mysteries of Pittsburgh as his thesis. Chabon’s professor was impressed enough to send it to his agent and the agent was impressed enough to send it to publishers. William Morrow and Company loved it, bought it, and published it in 1988. It soon achieved bestseller status and Chabon was praised as a literary wunderkind.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it is. The exact same thing happened to Bret Easton Ellis just a few years earlier when he submitted Less Than Zero as his thesis. Ellis’ professor landed him an agent and his agent found a publisher. Fame and fortune swiftly followed.¹

Ellis and Chabon share a similar humor and outlook: wry and dry. And each authors’ first novel was published in a similar fashion when they were in their early twenties. But the resemblances end there. Ellis almost immediately produced a sophomore novel titled The Rules of Attraction which cemented his fame. He would soon follow this up with American Psycho, whereas Chabon spent five years working on his second novel, Fountain City, with nothing to show for it. A “highly ambitious opus about an architect building a perfect baseball park in Florida,” the writing process was deeply frustrating for Chabon. He would later admit that he “never felt like [he] was conceptually on steady ground” with the project. At one point, the manuscript had ballooned to 1,500 pages.

Chabon edited a draft down to 670 and sent it to his agent, who vehemently disliked it. Fountain City was an amiable and heavily populated canvas that had its charms but no clear story arc. Characters wandered onstage to say or do interesting things, then wandered off. Chabon began to panic. His publisher had given him an enormous advance for the book, half of which had paid for a divorce, and he’d been writing for half a decade with no end in sight.

He finally decided to abandon Fountain City, but he didn’t tell his agent or publisher. He didn’t tell anyone. He simply got to work writing a new book about a writer who couldn’t finish a novel.

III. GRADY TRIPP & CHUCK KINDER

The new novel Chabon was working on was narrated by a writer and professor of creative writing named Grady Tripp. Grady Tripp is a fictionalized composite of both Michael Chabon himself and a former U of P professor and mentor named Chuck Kinder. When Chabon met Kinder in the mid-80s, the latter was working on a novel about his friendship with Raymond Carver. Kinder’s manuscript was spoken of in hushed, reverent tones in the halls of the English Department. At one point it had swelled to a ridiculous 3000 pages, double that of Chabon’s Fountain City.

Like Kinder, Grady Tripp is a writer and creative writing professor. When Tripp was an undergrad and under deadline pressure to hand in a short story for composition class, he plagiarized and submitted a story by an obscure writer named August Van Zorn, only to discover that a fellow classmate has done the exact same thing when they are both called upon to read their work aloud. They fail the assignment for copying each other but become fast friends. Over coffee, Crabtree informs Tripp he “intends to be the Maxwell Perkins of his generation.” (Maxwell Perkins discovered both Fitzgerald and Hemingway and was the longtime editor of both men’s work.) Terry Crabtree does indeed become a literary agent and, naturally, he counts Grady Tripp among his many clients.

After an initial flush of success, Tripp is struggling badly to write his fourth novel, which he has titled Wonder Boys. He was supposed to deliver it to his publisher Bartizan “during the early stages of the previous presidential administration,” which worries both him and Crabtree. Tripp’s anxiety over these missed deadlines is blatantly autobiographical: Chabon was going through the exact same thing. One gets the sense that he used Tripp and a few other fictional writers to work out his anxiety over his inability to finish Fountain City. Here is a passage narrated by Tripp:

My third novel, The Land Downstairs, had won a PEN Award and, at twelve thousand copies, sold twice as well as both predecessors combined, and in its aftermath Crabtree and his bosses at Bartizan had felt sanguine enough about my imminent attainment to the status of, at the least, cult favorite to advance me a ridiculous sum of money in exchange for nothing more than a fatuous smile from the thunderstruck author and a title invented out of air and brainsparkle while pissing into the aluminium trough of a men’s room at Three Rivers Stadium. Luckily for me an absolutely superb idea for a novel soon followed - three brothers in a haunted Pennsylvania small town who are born, grow up, and die - and I’d started to work on it at once, and had been diligently hacking away at the thing ever since.

IV. AUGUST VAN ZORN & THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE

The novel begins with Grady Tripp reminiscing about the first writer he ever knew, a man named Albert Vetch who used the nom de plume August Van Zorn. Vetch was a boarder at a hotel owned by Tripp’s grandmother, so Tripp saw the older writer often as a child and was in awe of him. Van Zorn/Vetch serves as both an inspiration and cautionary tale for Tripp. Van Zorn is a cautionary tale in the sense that he identified so strongly as a writer, his sense of identity was shattered when the demands of the market shifted and he found himself unable to sell his work to magazines. Still, Tripp admires Van Zorn’s work, his work ethic, and the way he seemingly embodied the characteristics of a writer, through a marvelous affliction Chabon calls “the midnight disease.”

The first real writer I ever knew was a man who did all of his work under the name August Van Zorn. His real name was Albert Vetch. I say that Albert Vetch was the first real writer I ever knew not because he was, for a while, able to sell his work to magazines, but because he was the first one to have the midnight disease; to have the rocking chair and the faithful bottle of bourbon and the staring eye.

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim - even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon - feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.

The midnight disease is a fantastic way to describe certain characteristics particular to writers. The darting eyes, the awkward stammering, the stooped posture from year’s hunched over a typewriter, journal, or laptop, the neverending search for stories.

And remember how writers like to reference or even adopt false documents for their own purposes? In 2005, Harvard neurologist Alice Weaver Flaherty published a study of the writerly brain called The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain. It may not be Catch-22, which was the last novel to penetrate the public’s consciousness in such a vast and irrevocable way (people who don’t read books know what a catch-22 is), but the midnight disease is still a weighty and welcome contribution to medicine and science.

Although Tripp admired Van Zorn’s writerly behavior - the bourbon, the late night scribbling, the rocking chair - and his work - he liked it enough to plagiarize it and try to pass it off as his own - he is less enamoured with Albert Vetch, the man behind the pen name. This could be a commentary on the gulf between fantasy and reality - Van Zorn is the fictional identity, Vetch is the real one - or it could simply be an excuse for Chabon to gift us with this fabulous passage:

He seemed simultaneously haunted and oblivious, Albert Vetch. The kind of person who could one moment guess at the innermost sorrow in your heart and in the next, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate glass window.

Tripp seems more haunted by the fact that Van Zorn was unable to sell his work to magazines later in life than he is by the suicide his lack of success drove him to. The rejections that the latter day Van Zorn is forced to weather might be a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald, or simply a comment on the inevitable fate of all writers. No matter how popular you might be now, the market is ever-changing. For twelve years Fitzgerald commanded astronomical fees for his short stories ($4000 in the 1920s, which is $70,000 now), but by the mid-1930s, he was struggling both creatively and financially. In a letter to his wife Zelda, he admitted he was “no longer able to produce the kinds of stories that satisfy the editors of the Saturday Evening Post.” His inability to sell his newer work to his most longtime customer had a disastrous effect on Fitzgerald’s subsequent outlook and output and is why one of his most famous aphorisms is “there are no second acts in American life.”

Chabon was less worried about what would happen to him later in his career than the immediate consequences of failing to finish his second novel. He didn’t have time to worry about what would happen when he’d been successful for many years. He was just trying to live up to his first success. He likely used Van Zorn/Vetch to show the fickle nature of the marketplace. Unable or unwilling to change his writing style to suit its demands, Van Zorn/Vetch shoots himself in the head, which is either a defiant gesture of integrity or one of despair, depending on your interpretation.

V. DISAPPEARING INTO THE FASTNESS OF AN IMPREGNABLE FAILURE

Chabon saves his most savage depiction of creative failure for the character of John Jose Fahey, who is also based in part on Chuck Kinder. I envy you your first time reading this passage, an experience I can never have again. It’s by far my favorite part of the novel:

John Jose Fahey was another real writer I’d known, who had only written four books - Sad Tidings, Kind of Blue, Fans and Fadeaways and Eight Solid Light-Years of Lead. Joe and I became friends during the semester I spent in residence, almost a dozen years ago now, at the Tennessee college where he ran the writing program. Joe was a disciplined writer, when I met him, with a gift for narrative digression he claimed to have inherited from his Mexican mother, with very few bad or unmanageable habits. After the moderate success of his third book, Joe’s publishers had advanced a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in order to encourage him to write them a fourth. His first attempt at it went awry almost instantly. He gamely started a second; this novel he pursued for over two years before giving it up as fucked. The next try his publisher rejected before Joe was even finished writing it, on the grounds that it was already too long, and at any rate not the kind of book they were interested in publishing.

After that John Jose Fahey disappeared into the fastness of an impregnable failure. He pulled off the difficult trick of losing his tenured job at the Tennessee college, when he started showing up drunk for work, spoke with unpardonable cruelty to the talentless element of his classes, and one day waved a loaded pistol from the lectern and instructed his pupils to “write about fear.” He sealed himself off from his wife, as well, and she left him, unwillingly, taking with her half of the proceeds from his fabulous contract. After a while he moved back to Nevada, where he’d been born, and lived in a succession of motels. A few years later, changing planes at the Reno airport, I ran into him. He wasn’t going anywhere; he was just making the scene at McCarran. At first he affected not to recognize me. He’d lost his hearing in one ear and his manner was inattentive and cool. Over several margaritas in the airport bar, however, he eventually told me that at last, after seven tries, he’d sent his publisher what he believed to be an acceptable final manuscript of a novel. I asked him how he felt about it. “It’s acceptable,” he said coldly. Then I asked if finishing the book hadn’t made him feel very happy. I had to repeat myself twice.

“Happy as a fucking clam,” he said.

After that I started hearing rumors. I heard that soon after our meeting, Joe tried to withdraw his seventh submission, an effort he abandoned only when his publisher, patience exhausted, had threatened him with legal action. I heard that entire sections had needed to be excised, due to aimlessness and illogic and unseemly bitterness of tone. I heard all kinds of inauspicious things. In the end, however, Lead turned out to be a pretty good book, and with the added publicity value of Joe’s untimely and absurdist death - he was hit, remember, on Virginia Street, by an armoured truck filled with casino takings - it did fairly well in the stores. His publishers recouped most of their advance, and everybody said it was too bad John Jose Fahey didn’t live to see his success, but I was never quite sure I agreed.

There’s a lot to unpack here, most of it hilarious. Pursuing his second attempt for two years before “giving it up as fucked” is a memorable way to put it. After that John Jose Fahey disappeared into the fastness of an impregnable failure is fucking savage. Fahey waving a loaded gun from the lectern while instructing his students to “write about fear” is just as delicious. You can see it. Losing everything and moving into a succession of increasingly shitty motels…chef’s kiss. The fact that Fahey is not flying anywhere but simply drinking at the airport when Tripp runs into him is perfect because it’s inexplicable. It’s not cheaper to get drunk at an airport. Fahey himself likely didn’t know why he was there.

John Jose Fahey serves as the ultimate cautionary tale for Tripp because, despite all the shitty things that happen to Fahey whilst he struggles to compose Eight Solid Light-Years of Lead, including dying, the novel turns out a success. Fahey’s publisher recoups, readers like it, and his reputation is posthumously restored. You can sense Tripp’s jealousy. Even though Fahey is dead, Tripp envies his success.

Perhaps Chabon thought it unfair that his former mentor Chuck Kinder had worked for over three decades on his Raymond Carver novel only for it to be released in heavily abridged and edited form (320 pp.) as 2001’s Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale to lackluster sales and tepid critical reception. Perhaps he felt that such a heroic literary effort deserved a happier ending, which is why John Jose Fahey’s initial failure to write his fourth novel proves a posthumous success. After reading that passage, who wouldn’t be curious to read Eight Solid Light-Years of Lead? What kind of novel would inspire such slavish and irrational devotion to its own construction?

VI. WONDER BOYS & THE GHOST WRITER

Chabon completed his novel about August Van Zorn/Albert Vetch, Terry Crabtree, John Jose Fahey, and Grady Tripp in seven feverish months, which is almost unheard of. He christened the work Wonder Boys and sent it out to his agent and publisher, along with a brief note explaining that he’d abandoned Fountain City. Initially apprehensive, it only took a few pages for the manuscript’s recipients to realize how good it was. The novel sold fabulously well and is now considered a contemporary American classic.

Part of what makes Wonder Boys so fun to read is the fact that Chabon clearly relished the process of writing it. And the work resists the typical romanticization of writers while simultaneously registering how difficult it can be to write. Chabon’s snide characterizations of book agents and lit-adjacent producers and publishers aren’t bitter so much as gleeful. He’s having fun.

Chabon is nowhere near the first writer to write about writing and writers. He’s not even the first Jewish-American author from the eastern seaboard to do this in the latter half of the 20th Century. My favorite Philip Roth novel, 1979’s The Ghost Writer, marks the first appearance of Roth’s infamous alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer similar to Roth in almost every way. He’s from Newark, NJ but lives in Manhattan. He’s obsessed with sex. And he has published a stack of critically acclaimed novels about the Jewish-American experience.

In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman is invited to spend a night at the home of reclusive author E.I. Lonoff and his girlfriend. Roth’s depiction of Lonoff is both affectionate and funny. Apparently Lonoff is either Bernard Malamud (The Natural), Henry Roth (Call It Sleep), or a composite of both.

Initially in awe of his writer hero, Zuckerman is flabbergasted to learn that Lonoff is in awe of him. Lonoff admires Zuckerman’s worldly experience and urbane wit while Zuckerman admires Lonoff’s work and stature. When he is introduced to Lonoff’s mysterious girlfriend, Zuckerman begins to suspect her of being Anne Frank. There is playfulness and wit in The Ghost Writer that is sorely missing from later Zuckerman novels like The Counterlife and The Human Stain.

In Wonder Boys, Chabon gives voice to his literary anxieties by using a constellation of fictional writers and their fictional work. Philip Roth takes the opposite approach in The Ghost Writer, using real-world scaffolding to anchor his fiction. He alludes to The Diary of Anne Frank and he models E.I. Lonoff on Bernard Malamud and Henry Roth. Both Roth and Chabon are using false documents to explore writerly anxiety and literary legacy, but where Chabon constructs an entire fictional ecosystem to explore his fear of failure, Roth borrows from history and mythologizes reality. Different methods and contexts but similarly magnetic results. Literature that pretends to be real has the same enthralling power as literature that actually is real.

In Wonder Boys, Tripp’s friend and agent is visiting him so that the two men can attend WordFest, some nebulous stand-in for all navel-gazing writing conferences, but both characters have ulterior motives. Crabtree wants to sleep with one of Tripp’s students, a shy young man named James Leer - played by Tobey McGuire in the adaptation I haven’t seen - while Tripp wants to smoke cannabis and forget about the massive manuscript that awaits him at home. The hijinx that Crabtree and Tripp embark on take up the rest of the novel (and its adaptation) but the novel’s best sequences by far are the inside baseball stuff about Arthur Vetch or John Jose Fahey.

Despite his heavy use of false documents in Wonder Boys, Chabon wasn’t finished with them. It’s as if he’d opened the flood gates. Now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop. His next novel was the sprawling 20th Century epic The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. From Wikipedia:

A historical fiction novel, it follows the lives of two Jewish cousins, Josef “Joe” Kavalier, a Czech artist and magician who escapes Nazi-occupied Prague, and Sammy Clay, a Brooklyn-born writer, who create The Escapist, a fictional superhero inspired by Joe’s desire to fight fascism and his struggle to rescue his family from Europe. Their rise in the comic book industry parallels the Golden Age of American Comics, exploring themes of artistic ambition, wartime trauma, Jewish identity, and the power of storytelling.

It won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is now roundly acknowledged as Chabon’s magnum opus.²

Issue #36 of literary magazine McSweeney’s contains excerpts of Fountain City, alongside detailed annotations and wry commentary from Chabon on what he was trying to do and why he thinks the novel failed. These excerpts are illuminating and fascinating in the same way that behind-the-scenes recording studio footage or b-sides or alternate takes are illuminating and fascinating. They’re not for everybody but for those interested, they can be immensely satisfying. And being given a glimpse into the vanishingly private and solitary act of another writer’s process carries with it a voyeuristic thrill. I’m going to be posting some deleted scenes and cut passages from my novel, All the Quiet Hours, here on this blog over the next half of this year.

VII. CAPTAIN BEYOND

All the Quiet Hours contains a detailed history and plot summary of a false document comic book called Captain Beyond, which is written and drawn by Togashi Ishiguro, brother of Kazuo. I named it after a 70s prog rock band who released an excellent self-titled record. The three childhood friends in the novel - Miles, Jacob, and Simon - once pooled their meager allowances to buy the first issue. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. You might remember that Simpsons episode where Bart, Milhouse, and Martin buy the first issue of Radioactive Man but their mutual distrust leads to the destruction of the comic book. This isn’t a deliberate homage but it is acknowledged by Miles, who says “whatever. If you live long enough it’s pretty much guaranteed that certain parts of your life will resemble a Simpsons episode.”

Okay! That’s it for Part I of False Documents in Fiction. Part II is coming in a few days.

1. Incidentally, Ellis went to Bennington College college with a then-unknown Donna Tartt. They were friends and peers. Ellis even read early drafts of The Secret History, my favorite debut novel ever and one of my favorite novels in general.

2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’s sprawling storytelling style, nostalgic qualities, and kaleidoscopic approach to describing life in America in the latter half of the 20th Century is rivalled, in my opinion, only by Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex.