The Lifespan of a Fact
**Edit - on 1/7/19, I saw the play with Daniel Radcliffe!! I'll add my entire review for it separately after the book review.
Book:
Premise - With an unconventional format, two individuals (an author, D'Agata, and a fact-checker, Fingal), provide discourse and edits surrounding a "non-fiction?" essay written by D'Agata. With D'Agata's essay on the Las Vegas suicide of Levi Presley centered in the middle of each page, the surrounding text holds Fingal's confirmations of fact (in black text) and factual disputes (in red text), with occasional rebuttal from D'Agata.
Review - The moment I saw that Daniel Radcliffe was headlining a new play, I had to grab this from the library. Since I've never been fortunate enough to see any of his plays (fingers crossed for this one?), I make sure to at least read them. This is the first time The Lifespan of a Fact has been adapted to a play, so no script has been released, but I imagine it roughly takes the same back/forth dialogue from the original book.
This book is one of the most fascinating pieces of... ahem... literature (?? What do you call this? I guess that's part of the point of the book) that I have ever read. I could hardly put it down for two days. You might find it uninteresting to hear some extraordinarily anal guy rant on statistics, facts, and figures, but in truth it makes the book quite funny. Fingal is precise as hell, and D'Agata is just so over it - art for art's sake, and what not. The two are so at odds with each other, it makes me wonder how they ever agreed to publish this together. There's a picture of them standing together at the back of the book. Their debates were so heated that I'm surprised they could be in the same room together.
As opposite as these two are, the entire time I was reading this, I had an internal debate with myself of whether I was more a Jim or a John. I suppose I have two modes - in the world of fiction, I am a powerfully opinionated John. Don't you dare discuss the moral obligations of art, art is there to be imperfect! When I am reading or writing fiction, I place absolutely no value on external logic. There must be logic within a piece of art, I would hope, but there's no expectation for it to bear a direct relation to the real world. That said, when I am writing a scientific paper, I am just as strong of a Jim. Don't you dare fudge that statistic even a little bit! This is a difficult situation because it is an interpretive essay, which Fingal's magazine labels "non-fiction" but D'Agata refuses that binary categorization. It's based on real events and yet D'Agata is not, and does not claim to be, a journalist.
I have mixed feelings. If there was a film adaptation of Levi Presley's suicide, or a short story, I would say D'Agata could take all the creative liberties he desired so long as it spoke to Levi's truth. Truth over accuracy, as D'Agata would say. That said, the essay format reads much like a journalistic article. The average audience would expect a short-story to be merely based on real events, but an essay/article is often accepted as fact. I feel like this problem could have been easily rectified if the essay was left as is, but there was some disclaimer like "an interpretive essay by John D'Agata. Names/facts may have been changed" or something simple like that. But John didn't want his audience to be "spoon fed".....
I feel like I would have been a good mediator for these two. Don't change pink to purple if pink is more accurate, but 3.1 million to 3 million? Go ahead. These two were just so stubborn and uncompromising. It was amusing and entertaining (93/100)
Quote - John D'Agata has several awe-inspiring quotes about the value of art, but I gotta pick:
"If a mirror were a sufficient means of handling human experience, I doubt that our species would have invented fiction."
What to look for - I love spotting the little smiley faces and typos. I don't know if these were e-mail exchanges or letters, but they are incredibly genuine. Jim is such a dork.
Play:
Premise - An Intern Jim Fingal is assigned to fact check an article (ahem, essay) by author John D'Agata over the weekend before the essay's release on Monday. This proves to be a near impossible task as he spots hundreds of factual discrepancies, errors, or questions. Desperate to do a thorough job, he travels to D'Agata's house to try to get the facts straight before the deadline.
Review - There was such an intense irony to this... we are literally watching a FICTIONAL play, that OBSCURES FACTS to GET AT THE TRUTH of the NON-FICTIONAL interactions between Jim Fingal and John D'Agata... does that strike no one else as odd or at least worth acknowledging? I don't think it was ever discussed in the interviews that I had watched prior to the play. I think this really stood out to me because I had read the book before seeing the play, so I knew how many "facts" were changed to make the play work. In reality, these were all written interactions. They happened over years, not days. The editor was not nearly as involved.
I suppose what makes it a bit different is that, as a play, it's clearly being sold as fiction. With John D'Agata's essay, it was being sold as an article, for which people hold a certain standard of non-fiction. But still, Jim Fingal, John D'Agata, and most importantly Levi Presley, were/are all real people and were here being represented in an obscured way to get at a more important truth. If that's not reason to empathize with John D'Agata's side, I don't know what is.
Based on interviews, I think Daniel Radcliffe, fittingly, sides more with Fingal. Critics I think also were leaning more towards Fingal. It makes sense in this political day and age with "fake news" being such a buzzword but I really don't think this play is about fake news at all. It's about the boundaries of art and fiction. When I think of "fake news" I think of either lazy fact-checking, bias that blinds writers, or deliberate factual stretches and errors made with a political agenda. There was definitely no political agenda for John D'Agata. He was an artist, first and foremost. I think the play as a whole did a fantastic job of finding a delicate balance between the two, which is where I would stand. I would be irritated if there was a clear bias towards one or the other.
Let me now take a moment to acknowledge that I SAW DANIEL RADCLIFFE PERFORM ON STAGE FOR THE FIRST TIME AND I MET HIM AFTERWARDS SO THIS PLAY WILL ALWAYS BE VERY VERY VERY SPECIAL TO ME (97/100).
Quote - "Things conflued" is the only word for word quote I can recall, but of course there were once again several great John D'Agata quotes. I liked his monologue about his mother dying in the chair.
What to watch for - I saw the play just as it was ending its run, so everything that I saw and could recommend is a thing of the past. But I did truly enjoy seeing Daniel Radcliffe forced into a closet under the stairs. Even without thinking of Harry Potter, it was a funny moment.
It's so hard to make a recommendation because there is truly nothing like this! If you liked this book, I'd recommend reading more essays by John D'Agata??
Essay written by John D'Agata
Fact-checking by Jim Fingal
Published by W.W. Norton & Co
Play by Jeremy Karaken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell
Directed by Leigh Silverman
Comments
Post a Comment