Loving Literary Journalism in Only Love
Two new books of literary journalism show that this genre may be a disappearing one.
By Andy Kroll
June 25, 2008
Books by David SamuelsNear the end of the opening essay in his new book Only Love Can Break Your Heart, journalist David Samuels watches as the corporate-powered Woodstock 1999 descends into utter chaos. Hundreds of thousands of feverish, strung-out concertgoers tear down the concert festival’s “Peace Wall”—a 12-foot high and 16,000-foot long security barrier “decorated with murals of unicorns and B-52 bombers morphing into doves”—and feed the pieces to the towering fires burning nearby. Police fight off angry mobs of college students and aging hippies while they plunder food carts for free cans of Sprite. But as the panicked, sleep-deprived crowd runs past him through lakes of raw sewage on the festival’s third and final night, Samuels maintains his journalistic poise. He later notes that what newspapers the following day would describe as a riot was actually more like “oddly light” mayhem. The real riot, he coolly explains, happened during the previous three days, "not as a single, chaotic, explosive event but as a slow-motion disintegration of the bonds that might hold 225,000 people together.”
Samuels’ Only Love and his other recently published book, The Runner, a book-length profile of Ivy League impostor James Hogue, are two shining examples of modern literary journalism, a writing style pioneered by Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese, among others, starting in the 1960s. Samuels, a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, has made a career by writing, reporting, and crafting lengthy, in-depth stories. But in the media landscape today, one can’t help but question the future of literary journalism.
With the rise of blogging and online content aggregation—and, of course, the increasing demand for real-time, up-to-the-second news coverage—has come a sharp decline in the publication of literary journalism. According to a 2006 Pew study (pdf), 8 percent of Internet users, or about 12 million Americans adults, keep a blog; 39 percent of Internet users, or 57 million American adults, read blogs. Of those 12 million bloggers, 84 percent describe writing on their blog as “something I do, but not something I spend a lot of time on.” Coinciding with this rise of stripped-down, minimalistic writing is a decrease in literary journalism publishing: Only a few magazines—The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly—have continued to devote considerable page space to long-form journalism, while others—Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, countless newspaper magazines—have ceased to publish it or have folded altogether. With this in mind, a voice like Samuels’ has never been more important.
Over the past four decades, literary journalism has most accurately and vividly captured the condition and conscience of America with books like Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and in the pages of magazines like the original The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, and Esquire of 1960s and ‘70s. Samuels’ two books are the most recent examples of that journalistic tradition, but what remains unclear is, with the rise of sound-byte journalism, whether there is a future for literary journalism beyond Samuels.
Reading Only Love and The Runner serves as a wonderful reminder of how well-crafted and ambitious literary journalism can be, as both books immerse the reader into the bizarre yet fascinating subcultures the author depicts rather than reducing him or her to merely a narrative spectator. The essays in Only Love and the tale of James Hogue in The Runner are sprawling in scope, told both from the perspectives of various characters as well as from Samuels’ own perspective. And also evident in both books is the author’s trained eye for detail, seen in his description of the company executive with the “perfect teeth of a former child actor” and the Woodstock concert stage that resembles “a giant erector-set whose builder has been called home to dinner early by his mom.”
In both books, Samuels brilliantly weaves together the various angles and perspectives of a story’s crucial characters. In “Buried Suns,” from Only Love, he recounts the history of underground nuclear weapon testing at the desolate Nevada Test Site, starting with the United States’ nuclear heyday in the ‘50s and ending in 1993 when the Clinton administration discontinued the program. But instead of merely retelling the program’s history, Samuels interviews the men who, 30 and 40 years ago, drilled the detonation holes deep into the desert floor and who prepared the bombs for detonation and who lowered them into the ground—men who did the gritty work and speak about it frankly. “Having spent the better part of their lives working in a secret world pervaded by the aftertaste of inconceivable destructive power,” Samuels wrote, “the men of the test site had learned that the windows through which their friends and neighbors saw reality was cracked.”
To weave together the stories of people to find the greater narrative thread—and then to painstakingly create a story around this single thread—requires months of reporting and writing. This isn’t a process that is valued by media today. Instead, it’s all about hits and page views. The voices of only a few—a pundit or two, perhaps a presidential candidate, and almost always the person writing a blog post—are all that’s heard.
Another storytelling element lost in the modern media fray is the art of immersing the reader into a scene, which Samuels did so well in the opening of an essay in Only Love about ACN, a modern-day pyramid scheme and the starry-eyed American dreamers who join the company’s ranks. In that scene, the reader feels like he or she is in the crowd at a national convention for ACN sitting next to Ed Kustanovich, the essay’s unwitting central character who longs for the wealth and lavish lifestyle peddled to the company’s newest recruits. The reader feels the draw of ACN’s mission, described by then-ACN president Greg Provenzano, who speaks out to his eager listeners at the convention like a divinely-charged preacher before his impassioned followers.
Samuels also has an eye for the subtle, revealing details, as in “A Prince Among Thieves” in Only Love. As hip-hop producer and former De La Soul band member Prince Paul boasts about his cheap refrigerator in his suburban New York house, Samuels adds that next to the discounted appliance rests “a value pack of storebrand potato chips next to a four-pack of discount paper towels.”
Most importantly, Only Love and The Runner each speak to broader themes about what it meant to live in America during the past decade. In Only Love’s title essay about a decaying dog track in St. Petersburg, Florida, Samuels opens with a shrewd meditation on Americans and luck: “The belief in our native good luck is a vital part of the American birthright, a celebration of the democratic virtue of chance over more aristocratic virtues like manners and talent.” By allowing a writer the freedom of 10,000 or 20,000 words, he or she can write a story that arrives at deeper conclusions about society, that speaks to the nature of American culture, and that often helps the reader learn something new about him or herself. Such revelations are rarely part of the blog reader’s experience.
Sadly, it appears that the opportunities for young, aspiring literary journalists are dwindling. In a media environment built to convey as much information in as little time and space as possible, the effort required to engage a piece of literary journalism has become a rare commodity. For the opening line of her celebrated book of literary journalism The White Album, Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” One can only wonder what will happen when those stories are no longer told.
Andy Kroll is an editorial intern with The Nation. He is a senior at the University of Michigan.
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