Among Schoolchildren

"Tracy Kidder spent an academic year in the class of a fifth grade teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts – a pretty working class, poor neighbourhood. I chose Kidder for this list because of the intensity of his observation, and what this book tells us about research as part of literary nonfiction. Sometimes we focus so much on the writing that we forget about that, and Kidder does it amazingly well. It’s intensely and faithfully observed. It’s also an interesting book because he doesn’t use the first person. He made the decision to keep himself out of it, because he wanted to really focus on the relationship between the kids and their teacher. And that allows you to write with compassion. Kidder writes about a troubled kid in the class, the way he affects his peers and his teacher, and he captures the teacher with great vividness. There’s a very moving part of the book where the teacher is talking how she was inspired by one of her own teachers, and wants to go visit her, but never does. And you realise that’s what being a teacher is – you’re inspiring young people, putting incredible energy into these fifth graders, but they’re going to move on and have so many other experiences that by the time they really develop into individuals, you’ll be long gone from their lives. It’s a very generous act, teaching. If you look at the first review of the book on Amazon, it’s by someone who went to that same school in Holyoke, and had the same teacher. The reviewer says that it’s a great book, totally accurate – and then she notes that now she’s a teacher herself. You can’t make anything up with this genre. It has to be totally accurate to the best of your abilities. The only exception I make is where I change names for political reasons, or in River Town I put one person in a different part of the town – but I explained in the author’s note that it was because of political sensitivities. I changed the name of one character in Oracle Bones , but I explained why. If you’re changing anything for such reasons, you have to tell the reader. But otherwise, it has to be accurate, and I think that’s non-negotiable. The story is never going to be as dramatic or perfect as a novel is going to be. But you work with what you have. That’s your pact with the reader. Paul Theroux wrote fictionalised memoirs, but he tells you at the beginning of the book that it’s fictionalised. I think it’s fine if you let the reader know. I really like those Theroux books. I have a problem with some of Kapuscinski’s work, which portrays itself as straight reportage. The Emperor is full of fabrications about Ethiopia, inaccuracies about the language and the court life of Haile Selassie. It has been said that it’s supposed to be a parable about Communist politics in Poland. So why not write a book about Poland, or a novel? Ethiopian culture and history deserve to be written about with accuracy; it’s not just an empty space where we can go to tell imaginative stories that are really about ourselves. And it’s not necessary to make things up or change them. Your material is there, and that’s the challenge of the genre – to maintain accuracy while trying to make the thing artful. The attention to accuracy doesn’t mean that you have to include every little detail or slavishly report each incident in exactly the same order in which it was witnessed. You can have flashbacks or shifts in time. But you can’t wilfully change the facts. You can’t create composite characters, or take somebody from X and put him in Y, simply because you think it makes for a better story. You can’t say that this thing happened on Monday when it actually happened on Wednesday. There are people who say everything we do is subjective and there’s no real truth anyway – the postmodern thing. I don’t really buy that. Of course, it’s important to remember that people see things differently, and they make mistakes. But that’s different from making things up. And when you take this postmodern idea to the extreme it can justify all kinds of dishonesty. Readers know that this kind of work has a degree of subjectivity. That’s one of the reasons I like the first person voice. I like to remind people that there is a bit of distance between the people I write about and me, a foreigner – especially when I’m writing about places like China and Egypt. There’s a gap between us, and the way we interact is going to be coloured by it. That gap also reveals things – when I describe how a Chinese farmer responds to me as a foreigner, we learn something about his character and worldview. I feel I need to describe that to some degree. The reader understands that it’s subjective – everything is being seen through my filter, and my presence may be affecting the story."