Keeping the Creative in Creative Nonfiction: On "My Mother's Lover"

What I like most about David Dobbs’s essay is the ending. It’s
poignant—the two photos side by side really is as close as he could
get Evelyn and Angus. It also represents a finishing point for his own
journey of seeking out the “pieces” of the relationship. For him, for
his mother and Angus, this is the best he can do. The photos were
great (why weren’t there more?!)

But I’m struggling to find much more to rave about regarding this piece.

Dobbs’s  authorial presence throughout the essay is hugely burdensome;
he will not allow me the freedom of forgetting HE is the one writing
this story. For example on page….oh yeah, no pages, location 204… when
Dobbs is viewing the photo of his mother and Angus in a seemingly
distant mood, before I am allowed to draw any conclusions regarding
the tensions of the couple—as could be drawn from, were it  present,
the delicately rendered description of the photo, after having formed
a sense, had it been presented to me, of the sort of characters Angus
and Evelyn were (not the sentimental mother-in-the-garden/Angus-as-

chipper-young-doctor cutouts Dobbs presents us with)—Dobbs descends:
“Was she suddenly feeling ashamed? Had she and Angus been fighting?
Had the regrets latent in the earlier photographs broken into the open?
Or had the rolled-up papers in Angus’s front pants pocket—awkward to carry
but apparently too important to discard—brought bad news?”

In terms of scene, the following is the closest we get (aside from the
beginning and his moment at the cemetery), and it seems Dobbs himself
doesn’t feel comfortable handing the scene over to his actors, hence
the glaring shift to present tense, which seems Dobbs’ way of
announcing that SOMETHING IS HAPPENING:

“She looks up, and with the back of her sleeve she pushes her black
curls from her forehead and gives me a wondrous smile. She delightedly
says my name. This smile will embarrass me at other times. But now it
completely drives from my head whatever inspired this search only
moments before. She smiles that radiant smile, and when she asks me
what brings her the pleasure of this visit, I can’t recall what I’ve
come to her for” (location 423).

Is there irony in this that I’m missing?

I feel as though this is the closest I get to Angus: “28 April 45
Saipan: “It ain’t necessarily human” — look at the angle on that - uh
- er - - breast.”  (location 259)

Now that’s an interesting piece of writing (at least to include).
Angus’s choice to insert the “uh” and the “er” tell me something about
his sense of humor, about his comfort with Evelyn. With those few
words, I can begin to form a sense of their characters and
relationship. Yet, Dobbs foils even this little experience with his
need to assure us, “ The angle of which is indeed most improbable.”

Sorry, I realize this is sounding like one of those bitchfest reviews,
and whenever I come across one of those I usually find something to
hate about the reviewer. However, if you took a quick peek at the above
review, you might agree with Hensher, the reviewer: "No one will doubt the
intensely felt emotions that drive this [Reif's] book. The trouble is that books are
not made out of emotions; they are made, as Mallarmé said, out of words." 

So rather than just point out all the things that render what I found to be a compelling
story into a dry and uneventful narrative, I’m going to turn this into some broader
questions regarding (creative?) nonfiction:

Rearranging, trimming, somehow tweaking events is a delicate topic in
nonfiction: Well, when is it okay to leave the events as is? Isn’t it
a writer’s duty to do something with those events, to make them enticing for the reader?

When you’re writing about a relationship you were never able to
witness, how do you allow for those scenes, those events, to speak for
themselves? Essentially, how do you create nonfiction characters with
photos and letters?

What is the line between history and historical fiction? For example,
how could Dobbs have made us really experience Saipan, really put us
there (or anywhere that he writes about) without crossing the line
into historical fiction? (I’m thinking O’Brien—questionable,
obviously-- Klinkenborg, Raban, Krakauer…)

Then again, maybe I have this all wrong. I just took a peek over at
Nikki’s blog and now I’m paranoid that I’m missing something here. (By
the way, Nikki, your WWII stories are much more vivid and alive that
what’s presented here). Perhaps it was his purpose to keep it all at a
distance, to simply narrate the story of what happened. I guess if I
force myself to look at it this way, I could see Dobbs trying to
create a picture-album effect: we are allowed this fleeting glimpse
into the past, but we are only allowed so much, and with Dobbs as our
guide through this essay we must piece together what we can. This
would fit nicely with the theme of the “the idealized lost chance”
(location 436). Because Evelyn never really put closure on Angus’s
death; his memory is much like a photo: static, representative of only
a slice, and able to say only so much for itself.