Writers on Writers Writing, in Various Writerly Ways

A good piece, for me, makes me feel nostalgic for something I didn't even know I could be nostalgic for. Makes me miss something I've never really known, where writers writer about writers make me nostalgic. The south makes me nostalgic. As does fantasizing about a writer's life, a sort of yearning for an artistic community a la the "Twelve Southerners," or for an off-the-grid cabin with damp floors and a narrow bed piled up with quilts where people talk in airy abstractions ("He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, 'Breath of My Nostrils.'). In this week's pieces we get writers as the subjects in all their (wonderful) writerly cliches: promiscuous, rebellious, reclusive, peculiar, stubborn, elusive, lovable, unlovable, forgivable.

I love how these three pieces work on a meta level. As not just profiles of great (or I suppose, according to Sullivan, almost-great) writers, but as pieces where the authors are sharing their first-hand experiences with these writers. Janet Malcolm's words rang clear for me: "The autobiographer works in a treacherous terrain. The journalist has a much safer job." In these pieces we get to see writers attempting both, openly admitting their personal connection to what they're writing about, and in Rolphie's case hearing her talk about her interactions with Malcolm, but we get the added benefit of hearing how Malcolm tests the boundaries journalism. As Rolphie puts it: "One of the most challenging or controversial elements of her work is her persistent and mesmerizing analysis of the relationship between the writer and her subject."

I love that these three pieces dance around this relationship in such different ways. I'm most interested in talking about Sullivan's piece, though, simply because I loved the writing the most. (And as I write this I become--unnecessarily, I know--disappointed in myself for being drawn to the one male writer in the bunch, who is nonetheless writing about an uber-male writer. But his writing was just the best.) I found Schenkar's piece to gush too much about Keogh, and Rolphie's was just the opposite--a little too cold and calculating. Although I really love how she allows Malcolm to call her out on that in this piece:

Earlier you had made the distinction between writers for whom the physical world is significant and writers for whom it scarcely exists, who live in the world of ideas. You are clearly one of the latter. You obediently took out a notebook, and gave me a rather stricken look, as if I had asked you to do something faintly embarrassing.

 I really like what Rolphie's doing in this piece, the way she allows her experiences with Malcolm to reflect what makes Malcolm's work "controversial," that relationship between writer and subject. But I'm just a sucker for a good story, and on that front Sullivan delivers.

I admit I felt disoriented at the beginning of this piece--trying to figure out where we were, what time period we were in, what country even. I'm glad Sullivan admits that "Middle Tennessee at the crack of the twentieth century [had] more in common with Europe in the Middle Ages than with the South he lived to see." This scene of coffin building--the green cedar, the beeswax, the harried and anxious coffin-builder, the scrollwork--all seems too quaint to be true. And what stunning details to characterize a person right off the bat--the formality of his name (Mister Lytle) vs. the strange familiarity/formality of what Lytle's sister calls him (and perhaps here is our first clue of a geographic setting within the pronunciation of "brutha."). The "mon vieux," "breath of my nostrils," and "beloved;" they're all so strange yet endearing and funny at the same time. We get a good sense of what this person immediately via names/naming, even though we technically haven't even "met" him in the essay yet. I suppose death always provides a good scenario to reflect on a person's character with such poignant precision.

I appreciate the sentimentality of this essay, because I admit I'm a sucker for sentiment as long as it's in the right hands. And of course Sullivan defies being gratuitously so by being completely honest at the same time. I found myself wishing I could have had that experience, that I could have spent those months in that house with the peculiar writer who had for some reason taken a liking to me. I love how Sullivan admits that he was totally aware of the objectification going on--the chopping wood, etc., and that he just didn't seem to mind. It isn't until he's groped and nibbled by Mister Lytle that my charm for the man is broken, despite previous misgivings about his fascism, racism, annoying habits, etc. Because Sullivan gave him the benefit of the doubt and still found him remarkable in his own way, I'm compelled to do the same.

Continuing further in the nostalgia vein, there's a certain level of yearning that's evoked when people write about certain time periods in their lives, or when I'm reminded of a certain time period in my own. Sullivan was twenty when he lived with Lytle. He was young enough to afford such an open-mindedness towards this man who easily could come across as a tyrant if I were to come across him now. Reading this piece and wanting to have been Sullivan in that experience (of living in the house not the groping, that is!) I had the profound sense that I'm simply too old for such an experience any more. My time for quirky and cantankerous mentors is over; I simply wouldn't put up with it now. But ten, twelve years ago, sure. And reminiscing about such time periods--when I could be so moved by a person--is mixed up with this romanticized South--the misty Tennessee back woods with its enclaves of eccentric artists.

I became a little disappointed when we meet the girlfriend in the essay, simply because she broke the spell of the relationship that had been developed so far in the writing. But clearly she broke the spell in reality, too, as we get to witness Lytle's infantile reactions to her. So where that was a noticeable shift in the essay, the scratching of the  needle across the record, it was for good reason. The era, like Lytle himself, was simply coming to an end.

"Sad news arrived from Zanzibar: There would be no Pygmies."

pygmy possum

pygmy tarsier

African pygmy hedgehog

 Just when you think Olmsted can't get any sicker. Just when you think the next architect could possibly come up with something more outlandish. Just when you think Holmes won't find another woman, or one will finally figure him out. Just when you think the storms can't get any worse, a winter any colder, the rain any fiercer, the strikes more inopportune, the deaths more untimely, the fair better attended--or more poorly attended, for that matter--the Ferris wheel any more anticipated, the events any wilder...well, they do.

Nothing can be out done. The power of this book lies in its lists, with Larson's ability to never skimp, to never cut corners, to always--much like the events of the fair itself--go to the the extreme. This seems more a story about an era, the peak of the industrial revolution, of over-the-top opulence and of abject poverty, than it does a narrative of the fair or the story of Holmes. Through his see-sawing between story lines, and by exhaustively listing the absolute best and the absolute worst of everything, Larson captures the tumult of the time and place. This book is all about sense of place for me: The bleak shores of Lake Michigan, the vision (always from above, I picture it) of the river reversing and the black stream leaking out into the lake, the wind and storms and flatness, the "blackness," the absolute stench of the stockyards. I can't believe that this World Fair holds so many firsts. I think the era is best captured by this image on pages 284-85: "Chief Standing Bear rode the Ferris Wheel in full ceremonial headdress, his two hundred feathers unruffled." Or maybe this: "The significance of the moment escaped no one. Here was one of the greatest heroes of America's past saluting one of the foremost heroes of its future" (286). Like watching the Ferris wheel rain down loose bolts, we're looking on, wondering--will it hold?

By using lists, Larson is forced to be completely even-handed throughout. The book's tension begins immediately with the opening of Part I: "How easy it was to disappear" (11), and is suspended throughout. I keep thinking of the graph teachers used to draw when explaining storytelling, the rising action, climax, falling action...but this story feels like all climax, a thin tense line drawn across the length of the chalkboard. I think this very tension makes the braiding of the two stories important--when we leave one story we can take a quick breath, maybe become distracted from whatever ominous hint Larson has left us dangling with in order to feel its full effect pages later.

I must admit the foreshadowing did little to keep me engaged in the story. I was engaged--fully--but it was because of the details, because I hadn't realized just how absurd and unreal the fair really was (and the time period, too), not because of the plot. Even Holmes's plot (which I was quite drawn to--sometimes I just wanted to rush through the details of geraniums and bulrushes to see who his next victim would be (poor Olmsted, I know))--after his fifth or sixth victim the absurdity of his crimes stopped feeling so absurd. And therefore, Larson's little cliffhangers weren't so effective. I think it's interesting that the cliffhangers changed in tone throughout the book. The tone became lighter, and Larson steps in as a narrator here and there to comment on the events: "Of all people," he says on 285, to have missed the fair--Mark Twain. Here Larson's banking on his audience's knowledge, allowing us to speculate on what Twain might have written, giving a nudge to the king of the absurd.

Less jokingly, the cliffhangers served more as little commentary or punchlines throughout. At one point some of the sections sort of felt like sonnets (without the lyricism)--something's happening in the body of the paragraph, then the mood shifts in the last couple of lines. Often, the lines were even set off. For example, on the top of 226 when Olmsted gets what he wants, the paragraph ends with, "Even this flicker of optimism was about to disappear, however, for a powerful weather front was moving across the prairie, toward Chicago." I think it's interesting the way Larson moves us through the events like this. Sometimes it feels like we're just being hurried along, and other times I liked his subtle commentary, his narrative aid--they served to break up the lists of facts and details and allowed me to get my bearings before moving on. It gave the book a very episodic feeling, but more like a documentary and less like a crime piece.

Larson treats his characters much like he treats the events--very evenhandedly. We get so many details about a person and a wonderful sense of character, yet they're still held at arms' length. I never feel any real attachment for Burnham or Holmes, yet I'm deeply attached to understanding how the characters connect with one another (not between those two, but between each and his respective group). I liked learning how cantankerous the architects could be with each other--that dynamic was really interesting. Perhaps that's what the book is about--dynamics. I guess he says it at the beginning: "In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black" (xi).  But I was puzzled as to why Larson is so keen on explaining that every quotation comes from "a letter, memoir, or other written document" (xi) because even if he's not inventing what was spoken, it seems to me he's inventing emotion, thoughts, and body language. It gave the characters a strange feel--again, like we're held at arms length. We're allowed to see them up close, but we're never allowed to really hear them. Just a few places where I noted the narrator blatantly giving us a character's emotion: "But this night he felt ill at ease, a choirboy among cardinals" (80), "Now and then he and Burnham caught each other's glances" (95); "She gripped his hand more tightly, which he found singularly engrossing" (148); and, of course, Anna in the chamber: "As she considered this, she became a bit frightened. The room had grown substantially warmer. Catching a clean breath was difficult. And she needed a bathroom" (295). I absolutely love this moment in the book because for once we ARE inside a character's head, right there with her, feeling what she's feeling. It's tense and gripping. But then there's that question: How could he possibly know what was going through her mind? And does he feel it's okay to speculate here because it's so obvious that he's speculating, because she dies in the next few minutes? The other moments could be said to have been extrapolated from his extensive research, but here is a truly impossible moment, which makes me believe that the other moments are equally invented on his part.

I personally don't have issue with this; to me he didn't really cross any line. But I think it's interesting that he seems a little hypocritical in his intro, breaking rules he seems to be such a stickler for. And as I continue on in my own journey of deciding when and if I should embellish, it's interesting to look at different examples of how people do it, and how they get away with it.

______ to be an American.

It's seems appropriate to me to respond to these readings together this week. Fallows' article serves as an in-depth analytical look not so much at the "problem" with America, but the problem with how we perceive the problem. Fallows' article helped illuminate our nation's long obsession with the "jeremiad," how, at times, we've been a country whose leaders hold people rapt with with an overwrought list of things that are wrong, and uses the dramatization to evoke a sense of camaraderie. The trendy question seems to be (and we're in this trend now), "is America finally going to hell?" Fallows asks:

Are the fears of this moment our era’s version of the “missile gap”? Are they anything more than a combination of the two staple ingredients of doom-and-darkness statements through the whole course of our history?

What is obvious from outside the country is how exceptional it is in its powers of renewal: America is always in decline, and is always about to bounce back.

I saw these two statements as encapsulations of what Fallows is pointing out here: we have a long obsession with a fear of doom-and-darkness, our fear of decline can act as a motivator to bounce back.  Of course, Fallows points out that we often don't seize the opportunities to "bounce back" when we should, and he also points out that our "decline" doesn't need to be fearsome.

If Fallows' article is a long "telling" of how America perceives itself, then Whitehead and Miller  "show" some of those perceptions in action. The two pieces complement each other: Whitehead's snarky cynicism, very a la Hunter S.  Thompson, critiquing gambling suburban society, and Miller's sincere and emotional diary entries depicting his own personal trauma of 9/11.

Whitehead hits on the American obsession of trying to improve itself:

There is the multiplicity of diversion, sure, but more important is the idea that a sector of human endeavor was diligently trying to improve itself, and succeeding spectacularly. Consumer theorists, commercial architects, scientists of demography were working hard to make the Plex better, more efficient, more perfect, analyzing the traffic patterns and microscopic eye movements of shoppers, the implications of rest room and water fountain placement, and disseminating their innovations throughout the world for the universal good. Even if we fail ourselves in a thousand ways every day, we can depend on this one grace in our lives. We are in good hands.

But we can sense a disapproval in his voice. Perhaps its in the deadpan voice he starts out with. By calling himself dead inside, I began to read all of his descriptions as critiques, as though he was accusing all of American society to be dead inside. Shortly after the above statement, he writes this:

I found my degradation. You can raze the old buildings and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority, but you can't change people. I was among gamblers.

He then dissolves into the snarky stereotyping, delineating the "types" he's surrounded by, breaking each down into their components--habits, wants, dreams. He's got them nailed, and it gives the piece a sort of "I've seen it all" feeling, that there's nothing left to be surprised by and humans just keep falling into this limited subset of personalities.

Miller, on the other hand, illustrates how "through American history worry has always preceded reform." Of course, there is no obvious reform in the piece--he's merely sharing what he wrote in his diary ten years earlier, but we don't get a critique. Here, as a reader, I was moved to empathize, to partake in the sorrow that brings people together. It's subtle, and in no way saccharine, but I do see Miller's piece--contrary to Whitehead's--as a quiet, hopeful plea.

Both pieces are very personal, and I think each uses his relationship to evoke an overall feeling of pro-Americanness or anti-Americanness. In Whitehead's case, his recent divorce, his feelings of being half dead inside seem to reflect the way he views gambling society in particular, and perhaps American society at large. Miller's piece is about trauma, but it's really a love story. We start with the ring, and we get to witness this couple going through the trauma of 9/11 together. Throughout reading this, I remember consciously thinking "at least they have each other." And I think it's the love-story aspect in each piece that keeps them from being either a snarky critique or a sentimental remembrance. It's the heartbreak story and the burgeoning love story that make each universal, that allows each to transcend being just a jab at Americans, or a plea for strength and hope in the time of trauma.

All this talk about America and literature is rather timely. With the Swedish poet winning the Nobel, the whole American authors are 'insular and ignorant' debate is rekindled. Thursday on NPR there was an interview with Alexander Nazaryan, who wrote an article for Salon discussing the comment the Nobel judge made back in 2008 explaining why an American author hasn't won the Nobel in nearly a decade. In the original article, which Nazaryan references, author Aislinn Simpson writes: "Horace Engdahl said that writers from the country that produced Philip Roth, John Updike, Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," dragging down the quality of their work." This seems, to me, so similar to what Fallows is writing--that Americans are just too concerned about our own narrative to really see the bigger picture.

Nazaryan, albeit admitting that the 2008 remarks sparked a lot of unfair vitriol, finds valid criticism in Engdahl's remark:

America needs an Obama des letters, a writer for the 21st century, not the 20th -- or even the 19th. One who is not stuck in the Cold War or the gun-slinging West or the bygone Jewish precincts of Newark -- or mired in the claustrophobia of familial dramas. What relevance does our solipsism have to a reader in Bombay? For that matter, what relevance does it have in Brooklyn?

It almost feels as though Nazaryan is suggesting that American literature can't pull itself from the jeremiad tradition. We're stuck in this rut of self-observation, and even, possible, self-lament. He even criticizes Whitehead here:

The rising generation of writers behind Oates, Roth and DeLillo are dominated by Great Male Narcissists -- even the writers who aren't male (or white). ...Colson Whitehead started promisingly with "The Intuitionist" and "John Henry Days" but his last novel, "Sag Harbor," was little more than the bourgeoisie life made gently problematic by the issue of race.

His final word is that American literature has come to fear the idea of the universal. I find it interesting that I just used that word, not thinking of the end of Nazaryan's article at all, to describe how Whitehead and Miller transcend snark and sentiment, respectively. Neither piece is Nobel worthy. They're successful in their own rights, but do they transcend the American experience? Or are they just products of? I did enjoy reading both--but is that because I, too, want to dig into the people around me? Is it because I become jaded with Americans, with the the Big Mitches and the Methy Mikes? Did I emote while reading Miller's piece because I'm already so  aware of the 9/11 narrative, and I knew I was supposed to feel moved while reading it? (Actually, I don't think so because generally I'm critical of 9/11 narratives, but this one didn't bother me so much.) I'm not sure how much it's worth agonizing over, but should we be concerned with how universal our literature is? Or should we just keep "writing what we know," and adding to the jeremiad that is so ingrained in us--at least those of us who've grown up in the good old US of A?

"The Death of a Pig," and a pig resurrected

It's difficult to ascertain where the success of "The Death of a Pig" would be without the success of Charlotte's Web. To answer the question: "What do they [these articles] teach us about what lasts in literary nonfiction, and about what truly connects with readers," it's possible to say that without the pervasive success of sweet Charlotte's Web, how it's become an iconic classic of the 20th century, that the essay may not have survived this long. It's possible to say that Charlotte's Web gave us a way of reading and understanding the "Death of the Pig":

The design of "Charlotte's Web" is more intricate, a fact that would surely please Charlotte. In 1948, White wrote "Death of a Pig" which appeared in Atlantic Monthly, an oddly affecting account of how he failed to save the life of a sick pig, made ironic by the fact that the pig had been bought to act its part in the "tragedy" of the spring pig fattened for winter butchering. Since literature is not life, White set out in "Charlotte's Web" to save his pig in retrospect, this time not from an unexpected illness but from its presumably fated "tragedy." The main plot, then, is that staple of adventure literature--the rescue of the innocent.

This is from a 1970's New York Times review by Gerald Weales, and it gives us an easy motive for the book that became famous--that he's seeking to save the pig that he couldn't save in real life; if this is the case, then the essay loses its nuance and becomes a mere narrative that served as a stepping stone to something greater and more lasting.

But, of course, we're talking about the EB White who was one of the "greatest essayists of this century," and we know "The Death of the Pig" has merit beyond its connection to the children's book. It's a piece I find oddly alluring, and it's irony goes further than the irony Weales suggests. Yes, it's not lost on the reader that White is trying to save a pig that in the end will just become ham and smoked bacon, killed ceremonially, a premeditated murder that is "in the first degree but is quick and skillful." But what I find peculiar about the essay is White's attention to details, details he seemingly has no need to admit here, that are irrelevant outside of the experience of the pig.

For starters, we know he's writing because he "feels driven" to account for the last nights spent with the pig because, "the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting." He can't remember the number of nights even, and we're presented with his more pressing worry: his own deteriorating health.

Only in the second paragraph do we get White's attachment to the pig: "The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world." Even here I don't get the sense that White has loved this pig like maybe he loves Fred, but that the story he is about to tell has more to do with the nature of suffering and how the pig's death illuminated some of those universally plaguing issues for White.

Once we get into the story of the pig's suffering, we know that White doesn't immediately attend to the pig once he learns he should give it oil: he sits and thinks about his troubles; he tinkers around for awhile. We learn he "dined well and at someone else's expense," before he checks on the pig at midnight of the first night of its illness. We have the details about the vet's pretty companion, how White notices she has an engagement ring flashing on her hand. We have the most overtly callous moment in the essay right after the pig dies: "I knelt, saw that he was dead, and left him there." He doesn't even dig the pig's own grave, and he doesn't rush out to help in the morning, instead eating breakfast slowly, because he knew "Fred [his dog] ... was supervising the work of digging."

We're constantly reminded of White's pressing, selfish needs. The essay resists sentimentality, and whereas we don't know the cause of White's deteriorating health at the time of writing (could he perhaps have contracted erysipelas after all?), I'm left with the feeling that he's confronting his moment of witnessing suffering more out of guilt, an after-the-fact homage to the pig, borne out of the grander realization that "Once in a while something slips - one of the actors goes up in his lines and the whole performance stumbles and halts."

So...is this what makes it lasting? What could we possibly learn from a story told during the outdated practice of "buying a spring pig in blossom time, feeding it through summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives," a practice that we'd likely file away into pastoral cliche were it written by a contemporary? I'd say it lasts because in the end it has little to do country nostalgia, farmyard antics, anthropomorphizing (although there is some), or even love for an animal. Rather it's an exploration of suffering, our own callous attitudes, the juxtaposition of the vibrancy of living and the finality of death--and what's more lasting than that?

White's method, with essays, was about "writing a thing first and thinking about it afterward." And perhaps that what made him so appealing. He gave us a new way (or possibly refreshed a very old way) of considering the world. I could see there being something so American, so casual and idyllic, so appealingly back-to-the-land-ish about this approach; what a notion that such meditations can actually be something.

And, of course, who can't love a guy who wrote a column called "One Man's Meat"?

And the role of Byliner in all this? I see Byliner as a storage place for a compendium of quality nonfiction. By giving the site an almost social-media feel, by allowing the readers to interact by "following," having favorites, creating reading lists, it represents itself almost as a collaborative collection of readers' favorites rather than a "best of" list being handed down from on high, or from some cranky editor. 

I think it's interesting that Byliner sometimes only works as a connection between the reader and the original source. I like that they do this, because it invites all the various publications into the collection as well, rather than seeing itself as isolating single pieces in Byliner-land. It shares the love, rather than claiming ownership of. It serves as a network and illuminates the interconnectedness of contemporary nonfiction. Where would Krakauer be without EB White and Hunter S Thompson? 

I also like that they do originals, and, as one of the articles posted awhile back on the course blog said, they do a very in-depth editing process, as much as any print magazine would.

 

On "Three Cups of Deceit"

I'm a fan of Krakauer, and his work in this article reminds me a lot of Banner Under Heaven, his deeply researched history of and expose (I think you can call it that) of Mormon culture (which, admittedly, I'm only halfway through--but it's incredibly disturbing and fascinating). Here I see a similar process--the focus on one character in particular, and how that person is connected to a broader organization, institution, or other affiliation. While learning about one person's story in particular, we are taken down all these side roads and tributaries of related persons, or histories, that at first seem unrelated but are slowly woven in to the matrix. Krakauer's main focus seems to be information--the gradual and methodical unfolding of a series events, the carefully paced and finely wrought narration of those events, presented in such a way that allows for the reader to come away with her own view of the situation. As Banner sometimes implicated Utah politicians as negligent for not prosecuting child abusers in Mormon country (i.e., Mormons weren't always functioning in a vacuum), "Three Cups"--despite the fact that his main criticism is on Mortenson--sort of implicates American culture for buying into the feel-good narrative. I haven't read Mortenson's books, but the way Krakauer presents it here, the questions scream out: Why weren't the publishers suspicious? Why didn't others pick up on the saccharine tidiness of the endings of these books? How come no one questioned Mortenson's Taliban abduction story? Maybe people did and I just missed it, but it seems like we were all too happy to accept the do-good work of Mortenson, that to question it would have been to poke at a finely constructed sense of hope. "How could those of us who enabled his fraud—and we are legion—have been so gullible?" Krakauer asks on page 68. Shortly after he quotes Callahan:

"The way I’ve always understood Greg," Callahan reflects, "is
that he’s a symptom of Afghanistan. Things are so bad that
everybody’s desperate for even one good-news story. And
Greg is it. Everything else might be completely fucked up
over there, but here’s a guy who’s persuaded the world that
he’s making a difference and doing things right.” (68)

Whereas I admire Krakaeur for his exhaustive research, his broader implications, and for outing (or further outing) Mortenson--I can't help but be somewhat suspicious of the fact that the point of the article is to reveal Mortenson's fabrications and difficult personality. Well before halfway through I get an "okay, enough already" feeling. I actually find Callahan's narrative with what he did experience out in the Wakhan, and details such as Abdul Rashid Khan's "wry sense of humor" (64), the most compelling parts of this article. I also loved learning about Hoerni and Wilson, and how Hoerni and Mortenson hit it off. To me, what Wilson contributed was the most revealing in terms of Mortenson's character: "he struggled to find a place in our Western culture" (29).

I think others mentioned their frustration with the abrupt ending, ending on Hornbein's words rather than his own, and I think I feel a similar frustration--I wanted Krakauer to bring it up to the next level, to say something grander about the pressure of catering to consumers and making sure that a book hits the shelves by Dec. 1st, just in time for the shopping season. Or I wanted him to leave us on a bigger note of the feel-good narrative, how we're all gullible readers. I guess I'm left wondering to make of all this except, don't lie, and don't do major heroic-looking tasks simply to "anchor the narrative" (67), which I think I knew already. Perhaps I'm expecting too much?

On the other hand, I do get the sense that Krakauer's work isn't really finished here, and that this article is an investigative cliff hanger: the saga will continue. I checked out Central Asia Institute's website, and Mortenson's defense to the various lawsuits that have ensued is pretty pathetic. And I become suspicious looking at the FAQ page--each "question" leading to basically the same explicit instructions on how to send money (there's really nothing else you can do for the organization)--including which currency to send it in. (I love this repeated line: "While our co-founder, Greg Mortenson, would like to provide personal guidance in your efforts, there are already too many demands on his time.")

On a structural note, I admire the way Krakauer deftly juggles the three various threads he's working with towards the end of the article. The three sections coalesce nicely, and Krakauer's able to show how the fabrication of the events, the shady financial dealings, and the empty schools all tie together:

All that remained was the final chapter—
which couldn’t be written until the school was completed.
Anxiety over whether a happy ending would take place in
time for Stones to arrive at bookstores before Christmas cre-
ated considerable suspense in the offices of Viking Penguin.
To generate suspense on the page, Mortenson injected
the failing health of Abdul Rashid Khan into the narrative. (64)

And so on and so forth.

So, I guess what I take away is a great example of how to research properly and how to construct an intricate, fool-proof, and compelling narrative. But at times I feel like the effort to keep reaming out Mortenson detracts from the piece, oddly enough. (For example, I feel like Krakauer is a little to eager to emphasize how Mortenson failed to summit K2). I'm compelled to explore the idea of how responsible we are as readers, and how we might even be "enablers of fraud," as Krakauer suggests.