Gee, I kind of like fiction.

• Author: Nocera, Joseph
• Position: Literary styles of journalists and novelists

Joseph Nocera, an editor of The Washington Monthly in 1978 and 1979, is a contributing editor of Newsweek and is at work on a modern history of personal finance.

A few years after The Washington Monthly was founded, Tom Wolfe, who wa >;s then promoting what he called The New Journalism, wrote the following: "So the novelist has been kind enough to leave behind for our boys quite a nice little body of material: the whole of American society, in effect." The New Journalism is quite passe, of course, even for Tom Wolfe, but I think that little sentence of his sums up rather nicely this magazine's stance towards both journalism and fiction. On the one hand, it has consistently banged the drums for a particular kind of extremely ambitious jou >;rnalism-a journalism that tackled the major problems of American society with a combination of empathy and intensive reporting and hard, original thinking and literary grace. On the other hand, it has just as consistently dismissed virtually all fiction since Mark Twain, describing it generally (as Wolfe did) as out of touch, irrelevant to the modern world. Matthew Cooper's article last December decrying the lack of "a new Dickens" is only the most regent example.

Who can doubt that the magazine was ri >;ght to champion its brand of journalism? In the late

1960s and early 1970s, the only "name" writers doing that kind of work were Robert Caro and David Halberstam. Now one sees it everywhere; last year alone gave us two stunning examples of how far the genre has come: Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, and Taylor Branch's Parting The Waters. (See Annual Book Award, page 23.) Both are rich, empathetic studies of important American events-the former dealing with Vietnam, the latter with the civil rights mo >;vement-and both have a scope and an ambition that are staggering. To the extent that fiction has dropped the ball in examining large societal problems-and I won't deny that it has-journalism has taken up the challenge, and we are all better off.

Nevertheless, I think the magazine has been wrong to be so dismissive of the virtues of the modern novel. Yes, the scourge of minimalism abounds, and yes, there are too many novels revolving around life inside a university English department. Then again, there >; is also a lot of bad journalism. My point is simply that there are things a good novel can do-places it can go; thoughts it can think; depths it can plumb-that even the best nonfiction can never hope...