Living Singles
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Long-form journalism is the only homegrown American literary form. I’m talking about the kind of journalism that, in an effort by writers to conceal how radically they’re blurring the fact-fiction line, is innocently labeled “narrative nonfiction” in journalism schools and M.F.A. programs. Narrative nonfiction typically conforms to the artfully narrow standards of American fact checking (another indigenous art) while enjoying what Dwight Macdonald once called the “atmospheric license” of fiction. Some of the most beautiful and illuminating writing in all of American English is narrative nonfiction.
So it’s entirely fitting that Amazon, that indigenous American e-tailer, now sells narrative nonfiction by masters like Pete Hamill, Ron Rosenbaum and Mark Greif in a pricing and programming algorithm that Amazon has developed exclusively for it. These are the Kindle Singles, novella-length nonfiction packaged as e-books. They sell for $2 to $3 apiece. (A novel-length Kindle book, by contrast, goes for anywhere between $4 and $12.) Amazon calls these short e-books Compelling Ideas Expressed at Their Natural Length.
What a great slogan. So sweetly cumbersome — a throwback, like the form itself, to a time when editors at general-interest magazines weren’t regularly forced to turn full-length articles into “long captions.” In those days, hefty features could be paid for with ads that ran against lighter magazine fare. What’s more, ads tucked into every printable corner weren’t necessary because magazines had eager paying subscribers and newsstand buyers. The market for narrative nonfiction shrank not because people got dumber or lost their attention spans; narrative nonfiction, like so many 20th-century forms, fell on hard times when the Web came along, and readers stopped paying for content.
But now, with Kindle Singles, Amazon has gone white knight on us. In one fell swoop, it has figured out a way to shut out virtually every entity that mediates between journalists and readers: traditional publishers, printers, warehousers, advertisers and the World Wide Web. All that’s left is the bookstore — Amazon — which is hardly a nonprofit literacy clinic, but at least it’s only one tollkeeping trespasser in the writer-reader pact. For readers used to greasing many more palms than Amazon’s just to get their word fix, the introduction of Kindle Singles should come as exciting news. It also should delight readers who cherish the twisted and spellbinding journalism of the 1960s and 1970s: Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and Truman Capote.
The Web giveth, and the Web taketh away. For nearly four years, this column — which ends today — has chronicled what has been lost and gained by the rapid digitization of virtually all cultural artifacts and experiences. I’ve taken a mixed view of the open, free Web. At the start, the Web seemed like a cross between a candy superstore and a freshly unearthed civilization on Neptune. The cultural flora that were growing in the Web’s nooks and crannies needed classification. What is a YouTube video? What’s a Wikipedia entry? What’s a tweet? But I’ve had to acknowledge the widespread worry that the Web cheapens content, and maybe even culture. The Web has been a source of real disorientation in the American publishing, film, music and TV businesses.
So it surprised me when a plausible alternative to the Web didn’t come from traditional media, which was so affronted by it, but from the tech world. When the iPhone first appeared, followed by the Kindle and then the iPad, it became clear that e-books and apps provided a way to siphon the resources of the Internet to individuals, who could now sample that energy without having to be vulnerable to the Web’s commercialism. That was an enormous breakthrough. Anyone who’s honest with herself knows that the Web stopped being a great place for consumers of culture a year or two ago. You think you’re reading the Web these days, but it’s reading you — gathering data on you, trying to sell you stuff, pushing you to other links. On the Web, reading is shopping. And sometimes you don’t want to shop.
The Kindle in particular brought me the first moment of peace from Web noise that I’d had in a long time. True, I thought I loved the Web noise when the only alternative was to recede into analog culture — but I have adored the silence I’ve found on the Kindle.
I never thought I’d back off the Web, but I have. The once-glorious freedom of the Web was not free. Its price is a bone-deep commercialism that cannot yet be circumvented. For convenience, comprehensiveness and social life, I still visit, but now I see these visits as at least as risky and irritating as they are liberating and exhilarating.
But I need more apps and e-Books during my retreat from the Web. And so I’m thrilled to find these Kindle Singles, which add narrative nonfiction to the forms I can savor out here. Narrative nonfiction in our digital era could exist almost no other way — and indeed, it once seemed headed for obsolescence. I’m extremely happy to see it back.
Thanks for reading.
Points of Entry: This Week’s Recommendations
SINGLE SHOOTER In “Rescuing Evil: What We Lose,” Ron Rosenbaum takes aim at the “bien-pensant columnists of the serious press” for refusing to address the fact of evil in human nature. How does Rosenbaum get to shoot from the margins? The freedom’s in the technology.
SINGLE MOTHER The critic Cristina Nehring, author of the swashbuckling defense of mad romance called “A Vindication of Love,” now chronicles another romance — between a mother and an infant daughter — in a Kindle Single, “Journey to the Edge of the Light.”
SINGLE OCTO Mark Greif, in the Kindle Single “Octomom and the Politics of Babies,” considers the validity of regarding the octuplet-bearing Nadya Suleman as an icon of recklessness.