Mixed genres, enhanced tales
You know how it goes when someone whose literary taste you highly respect raves about a book and you go right out and get it and it sits on your coffee table for a couple of months and then migrates to that table in the corner and then goes God knows where and about a year later you come upon it and dip in and are instantly enthralled and wonder who recommended it in the first place and did they tell you how crazy good it is?
The preceding is a feeble attempt to write like Jo Ann Beard, imitation being, after all, the sincerest form of flattery. Of course it’s impossible to even approach Beard’s gorgeous, captivating prose, as I found when I finally picked up “Festival Days,” her collection of seamlessly blended fact, fiction and memoir that probably gives booksellers fits trying to decide which shelf to place it on.
Beard is not the first to employ hybrid elements in her work. We can go back to Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” in which he recounted the 1959 murder of the Clutter family on their Kansas farm.
Capote wrote the book as a novel, with dialogue between the murderers and the family, although he was not there to witness it. In fact, he told the New Republic of his desire to create “a serious new literary form: the Non-fiction Novel.” He is credited, along with Tom Wolfe (“The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff ”) and Gay Talese (“The Kingdom and the Power,” “Honor Thy Father”), for the rise of New Journalism, the American literary movement in the 1960s and ’70s that pushed the boundaries of traditional journalism and nonfiction writing.
Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song: A True Life Novel,” about the life and death of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, who sought his own execution in 1977, raised similar issues. Explaining the title, Mailer told the New York Times: “To me, nonfiction provides answers and novels illumine questions. I think my book does the latter.”
One of the best examples of this hybrid genre is “Sylvia: A Novel,” by Leonard Michaels, a former professor of English literature at UC Berkeley who died in 2003. Michaels’ book is a fictionalized memoir about his first wife, Sylvia Bloch, who took her own life.
More recently, Ayad Akhtar’s 2020 “Homeland Elegies” is a novel written to resemble a memoir that has some autobiographical elements. In fact, the protagonist shares the name, background and career of the author. The book has been referred to as autofiction or fictionalized autobiography.
Back to Beard. “Festival Days” feels fresh even among hybrid books. In a series of stories, she pushes off from real-life events: “Werner” tells the story of a New York City artist trapped inside a burning building. “Cheri” is told from the perspective of a terminally ill woman and includes Beard’s imagining of her childhood memories. The story is filled with details that ring eerily true. At the end, when Cheri is beyond speech, it feels somehow natural that we are privy to her thoughts.
All the stories in the book deal with loss and the fragility of life. It closes with the title piece, Beard’s memoir of a dying dear friend and the breakup of a long relationship. The story is so vivid it breaks your heart.
So I say hooray for the hybrid. Use of the literary craft, including imagining the inner thoughts of a real-life character, if skillfully and sensitively done, is often more powerful than the novel or nonfiction forms themselves. We all seek illumination from what we read. Creative treatment of true-life stories can lead to easier suspension of disbelief, allowing us to become more emotionally involved in a narrative and deepen its impact.
“Festival Days” is a collection of seamlessly blended fact, fiction and memoir.