Being wary of “manifestos,” I can’t say I’m in any hurry to read Reality Hunger, but from the interviews with Shields (mainly the Rumpus one that Scott linked to, and the two-parter with The Millions), I’m having a pretty difficult time identifying his thesis. I take it that the novel’s dead as a form, and that a better response to our current culture/media would be a kind of artful fusion of essayistic and novelistic impulses, preferably one that eschews plot in favor of ideas and self-exploration. So I’m curious where Shields stands on the New Journalism, mainly because I recently finished two of the movement’s key works, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, about the formation of NASA, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, about the 1976 capital punishment of double murderer Gary Gilmore.

Granted, neither are particularly brief or self-examining, and both are novelistic in the sense that they’re absolutely brimming with plot and character and verisimilitude-building detail. So I imagine Shields might object. But they both also gain their considerable power from the fact that, by and large, their stories are true. Their characters are real and their conflicts actually happened, which perhaps makes these books more about “ideas” than traditional novels.

Wolfe makes no claims to his book being a novel, despite the fact that it’s structured and reads like one. Mailer, however, explicitly calls his book a “true-life novel,” and takes some occasional, if significant, artistic license, as admitted in his afterword. (For what it’s worth, the book also won the Pulitzer for fiction.)

Oddly, given Mailer’s penchant for self-mythologizing, this book’s foremost “fictional” conceit is its lack of authorial interjection or omniscience. The Right Stuff feels more like journalism precisely because it’s written in such a way as to convey the depths of Wolfe’s research and the conclusions he’s drawn from same. He may not use the first-person pronoun, but it’s understood that there’s a man behind the curtain whose interest and interviews have shaped the book we’re holding. His style, while more restrained than, say, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, is also incredibly show-offy (though often wonderful to read).

But The Executioner’s Song is simultaneously more explicitly journalistic (nearly every line of dialogue seems pulled right from an interview, as do many of the physical descriptions) and more authorially neutral. I was expecting something a little more opinionated about the death penalty itself, and was surprised by how nonjudgmental Mailer remained throughout, even in the second half, about the purchasing of the story’s book rights, which gets downright meta. Unlike in Wolfe, we’re never given a full description of Mailer’s feelings on Gilmore’s experience–we’re never told outright what Mailer believes the case’s significance to be, though it’s gently implied through novelistic means, like the occasional shift in tone or perspective, or a third-person flashback.

I found the book incredibly moving and thought-provoking precisely because of this method, just as I found it troublesome if forced into a specific genre classification. By keeping such a small focus on the minutiae of Gilmore’s relationships, lifestyle, and eventual criminal proceedings, Mailer allows us to draw our own conclusions as to its theme. The book is open to interpretation in a way that The Right Stuff, for example, is not. (I read it as a critique of the criminal justice system generally, the death penalty dispute here being mainly a metaphor for the system’s unwieldy mix of personal interests, biases, and vendettas, none of which actually address “crime” as a societal issue.) This perhaps relegates it to the fiction shelf, even though its contents are implicitly drawn from exhaustive research and a journalistic pursuit of the truth. But this very open-endedness also seems contrary to that pursuit, as do Mailer’s admitted, if small, fabrications.

So here we have, stylistically, a novel, drawn from a bounty of real-life evidence and testimonies, that forthrightly addresses significant ideas about society and mortality, but without real concern for strict journalistic methods. I remain impressed with the seamless blend of styles, even as I can’t pinpoint the necessity of blending them in the first place. Mailer borrows just enough from fiction and journalism to compromise his book’s standing as either, and in service of a story that begs for a definitive representation one way or the other.