As he looks to the past, Weingarten cites Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, Henry Adams, Jack London and George Orwell as early practitioners of first-person, semi-fictionalized
reportorial writing. Looking forward, he sees both a cheapening of New Journalism tactics into cliche (think of any magazine story with a first-person, present-tense lead to set its scene) and legitimate heirs to the genre's best legacy. Ted Conover (Newjack), Michael Lewis (Moneyball), Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Random Family), Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air), Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed), and Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief) are mentioned as keepers of the flame.
While The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight admires the pioneering audacity of its central figures, it also weighs the trouble they created. Even while Wolfe was in his early prime, zeroing in on the class striations that would loom so large for New Journalists, there were Wolfe imitators everywhere; the book provides some painful illustrations.
And along with the idea of telling feature stories from the viewpoints of their subjects came an unfortunate eagerness to conflate, exaggerate or just plain make up characters. The book describes how one prominent newspaper editor doubted Breslin's veracity enough to visit a hangout that figured in Breslin's column. The thugs and boozers and mobsters of Breslin's stories were really there, right on their barstools, as advertised.
New Journalism's greatest missteps are right here amid its greatest hits. Consider the repercussions of Breslin's novel but maudlin means of covering the assassination of President Kennedy. ("That's nice soil," a cemetery superintendent told him, when Breslin decided to find the human interest side of the Kennedy gravedigger's story.) Consider the lingering mistrust created by Gail Sheehy's Redpants and Sugarman, the New York magazine series in which Sheehy claimed to be transcribing the precise thoughts of a prostitute but had made up a composite character.
And consider Truman Capote, an earlier New Journalism pioneer, currently depicted on film in Capote as a celebrity sweeping into Kansas in 1959 to research the crime story in tiny Holcomb that would become In Cold Blood. He would indeed become famous for this work, but a degree of exaggeration goes with this territory. At the time, "no one recognized him or his work," Weingarten maintains. "Only two high school teachers had ever read any of his books."
Publication Notes:
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight
By Marc Weingarten
325 Pages
Crown
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