Review by Lanie Tankard.

In Lunch Bucket Paradise, Fred Setterberg sketches “the dawn of promises that maybe promised too much.” His portrait of an era covers the time from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to the Vietnam War draft, with a geographic concentration on California and Oregon. He tosses in a touch of the Solomon Islands for good measure.

The reader follows the masculine voice of the story as he parses his father’s life, contrasts it with his uncle’s, and then tries to figure out his own. His mother makes appearances, but the majority of the story is told via the major figure’s childhood memories and depictions of the two males prominent in his upbringing.

Chapters alternate between escapades and experiences, with an occasional section musing about topics such as the rise of suburbia, America as the land of plenty, and tuberculosis. We catch glimpses of times past through the sprinkling of brand names (Betty Crocker, Jell-O, Dream Fluff, Rambler, Ronson, Scott’s Turf Builder), TV shows (Steve Allen), and songs (Archie Bell and the Drells, James Brown, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels).

I’ve never been a teenage boy, but readers who have will likely relate to depictions of sexual yearnings. (I did relate to the mention of Snake Stabler, with whom I went to high school. Roar Lions!)

Paternal wisdom is passed down from father to son: “General maintenance…is one of the secrets of life.” “You got to learn everything you can or otherwise you’re just going to be a prisoner, like we were.” “There’s just not a lot of room for mistakes.” “Work hard…stay lucky.”

These precepts bombard the growing youngster alongside aphorisms spouted by his peers: “…where did working ever get anybody?” “Do it one day, and then you just got to get up and do it all over again.” “Nobody likes what they do.”

By the end, the boy has evolved into a young man ready to widen the city limits of the town he has known, poised at the abyss of the world yawning wide open before him — yet afraid of its promises.

And right there is the crux of my dilemma as a reader: I, too, am afraid — of the book’s promises in its subtitle. Is A True-Life Novel true? Is it a novel? Or is it memoir? Is it truth or fiction? Are the photographs from the author’s actual life, or an invented one? Have I read a nonfiction fiction? Faction? Autobiography? Docufiction? Mockumentary? Verisimilitude? Is it literary journalism? Journalistic literature? I find myself scratching my head in confusion.

I’ve pondered this topic before in book reviews: Half-Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Walls,  The Mother Who Stayed: Stories by Laura Furman, and Freedom by Jonathon Franzen.

Walls explained her use of the term true-life novel to readers in an Author’s Note: “I wrote the story in the first person because I wanted to capture [my grandmother’s] distinctive voice, which I clearly recall. At the time, I didn’t think of the book as fiction…. I saw the book more in the vein of an oral history, a retelling of stories handed down by my family through the years, and undertaken with the storyteller’s traditional liberties.”

Furman created fiction from diaries written by another woman who lived in the 1800s, and clearly detailed this on the copyright page: “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”

Franzen stated in his Ten Rules for Writing Fiction: “The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention.”

How does that occur? Novelist Amy Waldman speculates: “Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character’s actions or lines are truer than others.”

So just what is it that Setterberg has crafted in Lunch Bucket Paradise? It’s not Capote, Doctorow, Didion, or Eggers.

I opened my yellowed copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, touted on the cover as “Sketches of the Author’s Life in Paris in the Twenties.” I bought this paperback in 1971 at the Hemingway Museum in Key West. In the preface, written eleven years earlier in Cuba, Hemingway commented: “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” He counseled himself on page 12: “Write the truest sentence that you know.”

I’d feel less toyed with as a reader if Setterberg had clarified what he was doing in the book itself. Instead, I had to Google around to find out. He parsed his method in a recent interview, saying he started out writing a memoir. “Then I said, ‘I’m going to write, and every time the impulse hits me to lie, I’m going to give myself license to do it and see what happens.’”

Hmmm, okay, so here we have two polar opposite approaches — one using truth as a guiding principle and one using lying. I’m curious about how, assuming the ultimate goals are similar, the end products will differ. Is “Sketches of the Author’s Life” a more accurate summation, perhaps conveying the impressionistic method used by Hemingway’s artist contemporaries? Is “A True-Life Novel” truly a subtitle, or is it a disclaimer? Oh, if only James Frey had thought to slap it on the cover of  A Million Little Pieces.

Later, in an online essay on Talking Writing: A Magazine for Writers, Setterberg said he switched from memoir to fiction/lying because he wondered, “Did anybody need to hear about my childhood chemistry set”? Well, frankly, if it’s well written from the heart, I’d like to read about his experiments. Search Amazon on “chemistry sets for kids” under Toys and Games, and you’ll find 108 sets for sale, with 7,043 reviews posted. Obviously they’re still popular.

There’s a certain amount of trust on the part of the reader to allow an author to take liberties with literary license, if a work is well written. And there are individual chapters of Setterberg’s book that hold eloquence within them. His description of his father’s workbench, for example, moved me to tears, for I felt as though Setterberg had been standing in front of my own father’s workbench when he wrote it: “I liked the way the nails and bolts and washers rattled around in their ancient mayonnaise jars as I plucked them down from the wall of cabinet shelves—each container segregated by size and purpose, labeled with an ink-pen scrawl across a strip of tan masking tape.” Did all Dads do that in the Fifties? Mine sure did.

Setterberg’s digression on family photographs is thought provoking: “What do we seize and memorialize?”

His best chapter, perhaps, is the seventh, “Labor Day,” detailing work in a ketchup factory. The house fire thread, however, is dropped for way too long, IMHO, and never fully elaborated.

The copyright page notes: “Several chapters of this book have appeared in serial form….” Some of them won prizes and awards. Yet do they cohere when placed side by side? It’s hard to follow the timeline. And that approach can cause abrupt segues. There is no context, for example, when the protagonist of Lunch Bucket Paradise suddenly appears as a band member in Chapter Six, “Jungle Music.”

The book is a nice recap of a certain period of history in this country. Setterberg offers a look at the seeds of divergent views on the Vietnam War draft. As a reader, though, I felt abandoned at the end. I wanted to know whether the protagonist resisted the draft — and whether Phil survived Vietnam.

In a lengthy look at “The Rise of True Fiction” in Columbia Journalism Review, Alissa Quart termed it a mashup genre and indicated it’s here to stay. So we the readers probably need to try to understand it. On a creativity palette, it can be a useful hue.

Still, some small part of me wonders why true life itself is not sufficient.

###

Lanie Tankard

Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

This book, which was a bestseller in 2002, has been joined by memoirs by his brother John Elder Robison and most recently, from his estranged mother, Margaret Robison.

Reporter Lynn Neary on Morning Edition of NPR today interviewed all three members of the family this morning. Listen or read the transcript here.

Neary’s conclusion is one we need to hear and discuss:

“Memoirs have been much maligned of late because they are all about memory. But while they may be notoriously unreliable vehicles for facts, they are endlessly fascinating sources of speculation about what really is the truth.”

I confess that, although I have been reading about Burroughs, his law suits, and his family, I have not read any one of the books mentioned in the NPR story. Have you? Please enlighten us with your thoughts.

Most readers, myself included, expect that the basic facts reported in memoir correlate to observable reality.  Otherwise, we have a novel by another name.

With the help of blogger Gutsy Writer I discovered this Writing Your Life into Story website, one place that tells one of last year’s publishing scandals–the story of Margaret Jones, AKA Selzer, who claimed to be part white, part native American and pulled into the gangs of South LA.  Problem with the story?  Margaret grew up in Sherman Oaks and went to a private school.  Like James Frey, Selzer fictionalized much or most of the story but called it memoir. In an interesting twist, she was “outed” by her sister before the book hit the stores.

I plan to read Carol Bly’s The Passionate Accurate Story, recommended by Barbara Abercrombie, of the Writing Your Life Into Story blog cited above.

I will also catalogue controversies as they pop up on the scene.  By now, editors and publishers must be careful to ask for documentation for memoir.

But the question remains, what does it say about our culture, and about the publishing industry that writers make up stories worse than their own and then claim them to be true?  It used to be that people lied to inflate their resumes, and in business they are still doing so.  When novels ruled the publishing world, we did not have this problem.  Memoirs (note the s) were still written by ex-presidents and CEOs, and very few people without huge name recognition expected to publish the stories of their lives.

Is the issue as simple as the rush to a trend (everyone trying to outdo Frank McCourt of Angela’s Ashes for misery?). Or is something even deeper at work in our collective psyches?

What do you think?

A New Earth is not a memoir, although the author drops personal fragments into the narrative from time to time.  Hence, I will not review the book, but I want to reflect on the implications of some of Tolle’s theories about the ego for the telling of personal stories.

The memoir is all about “me, myself, and I, ” a fact that can only be avoided by adopting the third person, something Henry Adams did in The Education of Henry Adams, a classic memoir, and one of my favorites.  A few other writers have followed his example, describing themselves as though they are outside watching a life unfold instead of inside experiencing it.  In the hands of writers less graceful than Adams, this device can easily seem contrived, and while it avoids the arrogance of the “I,” it may also evade the intimacy of the deepest self-revelation.

Eckhart Tolle, like many other spiritual writers, talks about the ego as a false self.  Applying his ideas to the process of writing memoir, one might decide not to write a memoir at all for fear of retarding the process of spiritual growth from the nonessential into the essential self.  For Tolle, the ego is an illusion:  “What you usually refer to when you say ‘I’ is not who you are” (45).  The ego identifies itself through what Tolle calls form–external roles, titles, things.

Celebrity memoirs, almost by definition, focus on the external world and the rise from humble origins to fame.  They may be full of obstacles overcome and may reveal weaknesses such as addictions, but unless they are unusually reflective, they remain focused on the self that disappears when the footlights fade.

The book that taught me most about the essential self was not a memoir but a novel, Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark.  This story, published in 1918, chronicles the rare narrative of the artist as a young woman.  The first half of the book is all about the dim beginnings of the birth of the essential self–the hints from childhood, the passion for life itself, the strong pulsing rhythm in the veins.  As her desire to be an artist emerges, the young protagonist, Thea Kronberg, knows she needs to leave her home, find a teacher, and test her talent in the great wide world.

She eventually becomes a famous opera singer through this route, but she only becomes a great one after travelling to the cliff dwellings of the Anazazi, the Ancient Ones of the Southwest.  There, amid another culture’s ruins, she senses her connection to all other artists and to the essence of her own self.  Cather tells us, “Not only did the world seem older and richer to Thea now, but she herself seemed older.  She had never been alone for so long before, or thought so much.  Nothing had ever engrossed her so deeply as the daily contemplation of that line of pale-yellow houses tucked into the wrinkle of the cliff.  Moonstone and Chicago had become vague.  Here everything was simple and definite, as things had been in childhood.  Her mind was like a ragbag into which she had been frantically thrusting whatever she could grab.  And here she must throw this lumber away.  The things that were really hers separated themselves from the rest.  Her ideas were simplified, became sharper and clearer.  She felt united and strong.”

This passage, these words of epiphany among the cliff dwellings, have lived in my heart for over thirty years since I first read them.  Eckhart Tolle may explain what the ego is and why it needs to die.  But Willa Cather made me feel it.  Her words, almost a century old now, echo with the ring of truth.  This is the kind of truth I seek in memoir.  This is the kind of wisdom I crave for my life and writing.