Books

An odd position, when you consider that this is the movement that came up with the slogan “the personal is the political.” Now that feminism’s great “Second Wave” of the ’60s and ’70s is a good 25 years past, and its veterans and chroniclers are setting down records of its history with the benefit of perspective, the issue of “personality” remains a tricky one. More’s the pity because no political movement of the past century was so bursting with fascinating, combative, maddening and outrageous characters. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Flo Kennedy, Susan Brownmiller, Robin Morgan, Rita Mae Brown and the profoundly wacky Ti-Grace Atkinson: There’s raw material here for a half dozen Verdi operas and at least a couple of Shakespearean plays.

In recent years, some feminists, like Friedan, have written accounts of their experiences intending to counteract other writers’ less than flattering versions of the same events. Still others, such as Ruth Rosen (“The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America”) and Brownmiller (“In Our Time”), have written histories in order to preserve a vanishing body of memories or to inform younger generations whose ignorance astonishes them.

It shouldn’t. The women’s movement hasn’t metamorphosed into a pop cultural-historical artifact the way the civil rights movement has, by becoming the subject of “landmark” TV documentaries, approved high school curricula, recognized holidays and earnest issue-oriented movies, even though its influence has been at least as widespread. Perhaps that’s because Americans are still so ambivalent about the changes it prompted and the intimate battles it enjoined (particularly when it comes to the murky matter of who, exactly, were the bad guys). Or perhaps it’s because feminism has obtained the reputation of being dour, prissy and, worst of all, dissembling when it comes to admitting the complexities of gender relations and human character.

For this last reason, I suspect, few people realize how immensely entertaining histories of Second Wave feminism can be — though often it’s the least “respectable” books that are the most fun. Rosen’s history, published this March, and Flora Davis’ 1991 volume, “Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960,” are worthy and valuable books written by professional historians, but it was Marcia Cohen’s “The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World” (1988), a breathless and ever-so-slightly trashy account of the lives of feminism’s movers and shakers, that had me avidly turning pages.

Judith Hennessee’s 1999 biography “Betty Friedan: Her Life” and Sydney Ladensohn Stern’s equally unauthorized “Gloria Steinem: Her Passion, Politics, and Mystique” (1997) make for somewhat less guilty pleasure, while the unreflective “Life So Far” offers readers the chance to witness Friedan explaining — or more often ignoring — her more egregious episodes of bad behavior. (When Betty was bad, she was horrid.) And as for Christine Wallace’s 1999 biography “Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew,” well, lay in a supply of ice cream, pull up the quilt and get ready for an all-nighter.

What makes these books so juicy, however, is their inclusion of exactly those elements — conflict and “personalities” — that feminists wanted (and probably still want) to erase from the movement’s public image. Their reasons? The most radical activists (who often refused to talk to male journalists, or any journalists at all) believed that they needed to protect some members from feeling overshadowed by others and to give everyone a chance in the spotlight, but most feminists seemed to feel that a focus on visible spokeswomen gave insufficient credit to the grass roots and in some way trivialized the movement. Men, they retorted, would never be subjected to this kind of attention.

To which one can only reply: huh? Since when does coverage of mainstream politics focus on issues to the exclusion of personalities? The press covers electoral politics — about as “serious” as politics gets — as a symbolic battle more than anything else, a bit like a nonviolent version of a World Wrestling Federation match conducted in blue suits and red ties. And that’s not just the effect of the mass media; this sort of thing has been going on since the Iliad.

A recent poll of Americans indicated that women voters were evaluating the presidential candidates according to their policy positions, while the men were principally concerned with the issues of “leadership” and “character” (the kind of vague emotional thinking behind the belief that a record of war heroism is excellent preparation for a term in the Senate). In the totemic world of the male political imagination, to zero in on a leader’s personality and on the struggles for power within a group is to treat both leader and group as players, that is, like men. It may be irrational, but it isn’t patronizing; it’s a kind of compliment.

The women’s movement’s phobia about airing its conflicts was as misplaced as its dislike of stars. Though Steinem has said she scrupulously avoids challenging or rebuking other feminists for fear of offering the media a “catfight,” in truth, the women’s movement’s intercine struggles weren’t locker-room tussles over who stole who’s boyfriend — they were about crucial questions concerning the movement’s goals and future. Pretending that those arguments weren’t happening only served to compromise feminism’s reputation for common sense, candor and realism, a reputation now at an all-time low. And it locked the movement’s constituency out of the debate.

Lastly, the character and even the personal lives of women’s movement leaders are exceptionally relevant to followers and potential followers precisely because (unlike, say, the civil rights movement) feminism called for fundamental and intimate changes in everybody’s everyday life. This sort of thing is frigging hard, and people understandably sought examples, demonstrations, proof that it could be done and, ultimately, acknowledgment that the revolution didn’t come as easily as the movement’s recommendations, ranging from chirpy to furious, suggested it would.

Take, for example, feminism’s most famous rivalry, the one between Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Friedan shrugs it off in “Life So Far,” but the biographers of both women rightly note that it shook the women’s movement to its core. When Steinem eventually “won,” becoming feminism’s primary spokeswoman, that victory shaped the course of the movement. These two complicated women embodied a fascinating mixture of flaws and strengths, and each clung to some of the traits of traditional femininity while jettisoning others. Both were Jews from the Midwest who attended and adored Smith College, but there the similarities end. Few historians of Second Wave feminism can resist attempting to chart the uncanny symmetry of their differences.

Friedan — in her later years called, much to her annoyance, “the mother of us all” — published the enormously successful and influential “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963 and followed it up by co-founding the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), but she was eventually pushed out of the leadership of all three groups. A charismatic public speaker, Friedan had a remarkable talent for stirring people into action; her lecture tours left NOW chapters in their wake like the breadcrumbs scattered behind Hansel and Gretel. But Friedan was also, by her own admission, “a bad-tempered bitch.” She is less willing to admit that she also abused and betrayed some of her most loyal followers, expected to be waited on hand and foot, was prone to paranoia and vengefulness, and hated to share the spotlight.

A housewife and mother of three with a freelance writing career on the side when “The Feminist Mystique” came out, Friedan always saw herself as the voice of mainstream feminism. NOW, to her mind, was “not about sex, but about equal opportunity in jobs” and, eventually, passing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Though she always supported abortion rights, she eventually became disgusted with what she saw as NOW’s growing “preoccupation with lesbian rights, the disconnect from the majority of women who supported equality … the overemphasis on racism, poverty and rape, everything and anything but the problems of white and black middle-class women.” In short, Friedan’s positions were as politically unfashionable in the mid-1970s as they are fashionable now.

If Friedan was the pragmatist, Gloria Steinem was an ideologue, a coiner of such slogans as “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” — the kind of glib “female chauvinism” that made Friedan apoplectic. But in an upset of all the stereotypes about pragmatists and ideologues, Friedan was impossible, bossy, bombastic, intolerant — she pissed people off — while Steinem was the consummate peacemaker, capable of pulling together the anarchic NWPC, whose first organizing conference included women ranging from former sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer to white-glove ladies like Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird Johnson’s former press secretary. Hennessee, Friedan’s biographer, writes that “the caucus had the impossible task of trying to unify all these disparate interests virtually overnight — a job tailor-made for Gloria’s talents.”

A glamorous sphinx (a college friend once dragged her by the leg down a hallway, shouting “Why don’t you ever get angry? Get angry!”), Steinem survived a grim youth caring alone for her mad mother in a rat-infested hovel in Toledo, to become one of Manhattan’s “Beautiful People,” hobnobbing with literary, intellectual and sports celebrities. A stylish benefit she threw for Cesar Chavez’s United Farmworkers in Southampton was the quintessence of what Tom Wolfe dubbed “Radical Chic,” but her political commitments were always sincere and generous, particularly after she converted to feminism at an abortion speak-out in 1969. Furthermore, in her dealings with others she was unfailingly kind, patient and humble, the mirror opposite of Friedan. She never had children and, despite dating a series of prominent men, strenuously avoided marriage.

Ronnie Feit, who coordinated that first NWPC conference, deftly defined the two women’s political skills for Steinem’s biographer, Sydney Ladensohn Stern: “Betty had a clearer sense of political groundedness. She cares about issues and is a big thinker. I didn’t think of Gloria in the same league. She’s a good consensus builder, but was defending an ideologically narrower viewpoint — political correctness — and she seemed insecure about how much she was willing to stand up and say what she really stood for … she was a careful operator. Betty was a sloppy operator. She had raw energy and showed her flaws. Gloria was much more image-conscious.”

Because Steinem never had much of an internal political lodestar beyond an instinctive sympathy for anyone she saw as victimized, she tended to reflect the ideas of the urban intelligentsia who surrounded her, which in the 1970s leaned pretty far left. In their view, Friedan’s achievements could be minimized as (in the words of an NWPC statement) “reporting the then little-known dilemma of the well-educated white middle-class housewife,” because she hadn’t devoted herself to championing oppressed minorities or devising elaborate critiques of patriarchy. However, middle-class white women were and always have been feminism’s core political base, a fact Friedan never forgot. Whatever the worthiness of Steinem’s causes (it varied), in the end her leadership contributed to making the movement seem irrelevant to that base.

In a cascading series of ironies, Steinem’s classically feminine personal style led her to adopt some of the movement’s most radical ideas. Single and childless, she was the quintessential independent “career woman,” but with the enviable style and boyfriend options of Jacqueline Onassis. Her “smashing looks” both thrilled and deeply confused the media. Hennessee and others relate a telling anecdote: “In 1972, Kingman Brewster, then president of Yale, told an audience of graduate women that he could accept the part of the movement represented by Gloria — the part that included men,” but not the supposedly man-hating philosophy of Friedan. He had, of course, completely transposed the two women’s positions.

Meanwhile, Friedan’s jealousy and frustration diverted her energy. She got shamefully involved in an attempt by some of the movement’s early radicals to insinuate that Steinem was a CIA agent. And while she recognized that the integration of work and family had become the primary concern of her constituency, her 1981 book addressing that anxiety, “The Second Stage,” was too muddily conceived and reactive to rally them. Some of the decisions both women faced were true quandaries. Friedan was politically shrewd in trying to keep the issue of lesbian rights off the feminist agenda, while Steinem was morally right to stand up for them.

This perpetually intriguing rivalry unfolded against an hyperactive and colorful social backdrop in which anything could happen. Radical groups formed and in a few months began fissioning into factions that savagely denounced each other. Jill Johnston “rebutted” a Norman Mailer assertion at a public debate by making out with two other women onstage at New York’s Town Hall. Susan Brownmiller led a nine-hour sit-in in the offices of Ladies Home Journal during which Shulamith Firestone had to be restrained from throwing the editor-in-chief out a window. Pat Buckley sprang from the audience at a Ti-Grace Atkinson lecture and belted the speaker for bad-mouthing the Catholic Church.

Atkinson herself was a veritable cottage industry of political high jinks. Handpicked by Friedan, who thought her elegant looks and breeding would help make the movement respectable, Atkinson, as president of New York NOW, horrified her sponsor by first coming out in support of the violently insane Valerie Solanas (the woman who shot Andy Warhol) and her one-woman Society for Cutting Up Men (S.C.U.M.), then calling for the abolition of the nuclear family, urging feminists to forgo sex with men. Finally, she had a passionate affair with a Mafia don whom she took to calling “Sister Joseph Columbo” at rallies called to protest violence against women.

All of this would be a bit depressing if the women’s movement hadn’t also accomplished a great deal: everything from de-sex-segregating the want ads (few people seem to remember that they used to be divided between “Help Wanted, Men” — the good jobs — and “Help Wanted, Women”) and laying the groundwork for the legalization of abortion to the invention of domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers. Ladies, if you’ve got a credit card or a mortgage in your own name, you almost certainly have feminism to thank for it. And though women, including married mothers, had for economic reasons begun moving into the workforce even before Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique” (Rosen points out that “by 1955 more women worked in the labor force than had during World War II”), NOW helped them get better jobs by forcing the government to enforce the sex-discrimination prohibitions in the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.

What happened afterwards — feminism’s descent into the sinkholes of essentialism (the notion that women are inherently morally superior to men), victimology and doctrinaire self-righteousness — has its roots, actual and symbolic, in the personalities and feuds of the ’60s and ’70s. Gloria Steinem was a role model who supposedly short-circuited the can’t-get-a-man stereotypes about “women’s libbers,” but her life had nothing in common with that of the average American woman, rich, poor or middle-class. Friedan’s populist instincts and vision were mostly sound, but she had a tragic, Lear-like inability to handle her own power, so she lost much of it.

In “Life So Far,” Friedan doesn’t show any sign of recognizing that weakness. But at 79, she’s still writing frankly about her own life in ways that many will find refreshing. Remember that when she conceived of “The Feminine Mystique,” it was a widely held conventional belief that any woman not content to limit her life to the domestic sphere was emotionally maladjusted. Part of Friedan’s genius is her stubborn, unfeminine assertion of her own truth in the face of truisms — even when they’re feminist truisms. Writing today of her sometimes violent 22-year marriage to Carl Friedan, she admits to being caught up in a destructive dynamic in which “I taunted him into finally beating me up” as a way of venting marital pressures. While some battering relationships are simple tyrannies, the reality is that others, like the Freidans’ marriage, are more complex dances in which each party willfully torments the other. (Her husband, incensed by the new memoir, insists that he never “gratuitously hit anyone,” which, to the extent that it refutes “Life So Far,” does so only obliquely.)

Likewise, Freidan is honest about her worries that her fame and success hampered her marriage and made it hard for her to form another lasting romantic relationship. The more conventional feminist position would be to deny those fears, or to toss off the old “fish without a bicycle” line, or to castigate men for their failure of nerve — all of which tend to make similar women feel guilty for being weak enough to suffer from such anxieties to begin with.

It’s also a cruel betrayal because the conundrum of how women can reconcile the tremendous changes in their social role with their perfectly human desires for love and family is perhaps feminism’s biggest challenge. It’s certainly a problem that merits more than facile slogans. At the very least, a forthright acknowledgment of the situation is a good start, and good starts are a Friedan speciality.

It was only natural that the women who flocked to the resurgence of feminism in the ’60s should be flamboyant and ambitious — in fact it’s remarkable, reading “The Sisterhood,” to discover how many of them once dreamed of becoming actresses. These were all the girls who couldn’t fit into the demure role ordained for women in the ’50s, people who wanted to run things, to be the center of attention, often at any cost. There ought to be room in the world for women like that, though there don’t seem to be many included in the ranks of feminism anymore. Perhaps that’s because of the more cautious and centrist tenor of our times or perhaps it’s because feminism eventually developed its own form of rigid good-girlism, but a little personality wouldn’t hurt right now.

Both of these novels ask questions as difficult as those posed by any serious writer: Why do we suffer, why must we die, and what meaning can be found in any of it? More important, they are not afraid to respond to these questions unflinchingly. These books are often — very often — funny, but they aren’t frivolous. I can think of a dozen acclaimed contemporary adult novelists who blunder through this territory, wallowing in sinkholes of sentiment, tangling their narratives in thickets of saccharine fabulism. It makes no sense that the maudlin goo that is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” should be classified as a work for adults, when “The Fault in Our Stars,” a far more mature rumination on the same themes, is regarded as a children’s book. Likewise, why should grown-ups be subjected to the cutesy “The Life of Pi” while teenagers get to revel in an astringent fable like “There Is No Dog”?

“The Fault in Our Stars” is told in the first person, with the sort of fresh, irreverent voice that inevitably gets compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. This story, however, comes from a character infinitely more appealing than Holden. Her name is Hazel Lancaster, and she is dying. The thyroid cancer that will eventually kill her is being held in abeyance by an experimental drug, but she still needs an oxygen tank, and she spends a lot of time worrying that she’s an emotional “grenade” for her parents. “There is only one thing shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re 16,” she observes, “and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” She’d prefer to limit the damage.

And yet, who could help but love her? Certainly not Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma with a replacement leg he calls Old Prosty. The two meet at a support group, where they are suitably skeptical about the inspirational mottoes and the covert competition to end up among the 20 percent who’ll still be alive in five years. A tender, bookish, wisecracking romance ensues, fueled in part by the couple’s shared enthusiasm for a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” Hazel’s favorite, yet something she mostly “can’t tell people about, one of those books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“An Imperial Affliction” ends in the middle of a sentence, and while Hazel thinks she knows why, she still wishes she could find out what happens to its characters. The author, who has written nothing else, lives reclusively in Amsterdam. The two young people hatch a plan to visit him and extract the answers to Hazel’s questions. It’s a quest complicated by the difficulty of traveling with oxygen tanks and prosthetics, but enabled by the sort of favors Hazel sardonically refers to as “cancer perks.” There will be grenades, but not in the places where you expect them.

The sparkling, satirical “There Is No Dog” extrapolates from a clever premise: If this world — “not just full of suffering” but “full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. For the hell of it” — has a creator, the only deity messed up enough to have made it must be a teenage boy. His name is Bob, and he’s petulant, self-absorbed and hormone-addled. Most of the actual work gets done by the middle-aged Mr. B, a put-upon administrative second banana who spends his time frantically trying to limit the damage caused by Bob’s moods and negligence.

Bob got punted this job (“miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat run-down part of the universe”) by his feckless mother, Mona, who won it in a celestial poker game. His initial efforts at creating light consisted of “fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows,” all of which Bob regarded as “very cool” even though they didn’t work. (The functional aspects of the solar system were executed by Mr. B while Bob napped.) Creating humanity in his own image (“one big fat recipe for disaster”) is this creator’s crowning misdeed and results in a long history of Bob falling in love with mortal women, an emotion whose agonizing ups and downs trigger bizarre weather and other natural disasters. “There is No Dog” begins just as a lovely assistant zookeeper named Lucy comes to Bob’s amorous and catastrophic attention.

Rosoff gets an impressive amount of mileage out of what might otherwise seem like a joke. This is largely due to a lively extended cast of characters who include Lucy’s mother, the dispirited vicar who pines for her, Mona’s terrifying poker buddy and his thoughtful daughter, Estelle. There’s also Bob’s neglected pet (“I don’t ignore him! Just last night I made him bring me some food!”) the Eck, an endearingly hapless “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, in danger of being eaten by Estelle’s father.

It’s debatable whether Rosoff’s shrewd, trim prose might not occasionally fly just over the heads of teen readers. (Lucy’s mother is memorably described as “having the air of an expensive pony — sturdy, alert and well-groomed.”) But it’s rather thrilling to know that stylists of her caliber have dedicated themselves to writing for young readers, and that it doesn’t even seem to occur to her to pander to them. Not much in today’s culture inspires hope for the future — or at least not credibly so — but I count the knowledge that so many teenagers read and love books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog” as one of the bright spots.

“The Lifespan of a Fact” by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal documents the epic fact checking of “What Happens There,” an essay D’Agata wrote about a teenager who committed suicide by jumping from the observation deck of a Las Vegas hotel. Their exchanges merit publication in part because D’Agata is the leading light of a literary movement (largely confined to MFA programs in creative nonfiction) advancing the “lyric essay,” a form that combines elements of poetry with the prose essay. D’Agata has been militant in asserting his liberty as an artist to alter, invent or ignore facts in writing his essays, as well as critical of the eruptions of outrage that greet the increasingly commonplace discovery that some celebrated memoirist has embellished or fabricated parts of his or her work.

If this face-off between a meticulous establisher of truth and a bold champion of poetic license strikes you as a bit contrived, then I say: well spotted! A provocative excerpt from the book appeared in Harper’s last week, featuring each man performing his role to the hilt. Fingal pettifogs obsessively over whether there are 31 or 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas and D’Agata makes the absurdly highhanded pronouncement that “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘thirty-one,’ so I changed it.” Several of D’Agata’s most dickish replies have been cherry-picked for inclusion.

This excerpt is not a fair representation of the book, but then the book itself is a travesty of the fact-checking process. The impression has been given that Fingal is a paid fact checker for Harper’s, the magazine that originally commissioned D’Agata’s essay. Actually, he was an intern for the Believer magazine, a literary journal that picked up the piece after Harper’s declined to publish it and that encourages its interns to volunteer for ambitious projects and pursue them independently. When Fingal tells D’Agata, early on, “It’s the job I was assigned to do, so I have to do it,” he is — ironically enough — not being strictly accurate.

Any lingering impression that Fingal is a put-upon toiler in the boiler room of journalism dissolves as he introduces more and more tedious digressions and unfunny wisecracks into an ever-burgeoning pissing match. Many of Fingal’s quibbles — such as asking D’Agata for notes on a guided bus tour he took as a college student in 1994, or insisting that the mountains southeast of Vegas look “brownish” to him, rather than “black” as D’Agata described them — are so over-the-top that the writer’s snappishness becomes understandable.

Fact checking, contrary to vague popular perceptions, is something of an art; not only does each publication have its own policy for substantiating facts, but each checker has his or her own approach. Nevertheless, there are many constants. Fingal’s method is eccentric, to say the least. For example, he tracks down and transcribes the National Institutes of Health’s definition of a drug that one of D’Agata’s quoted sources mentions only in passing, yet he never seems to have contacted any of the sources themselves, either to check their quotes or to verify their titles or biographical details. Much of what he does is unnecessary by even the most rigorous of magazine fact-checking standards (and glossy-magazine fact checking is as rigorous as it gets), and yet he neglects some basic techniques of verification.

D’Agata is no better advocate for his position. He offers the “rhythm” defense more than once, and when Fingal raises legitimate questions about his attempt to present suicide as a universal taboo across cultures and historical periods, he stoops to the retort, “Wow Jim, your penis must be so much bigger than mine.” (Although it must be said that this is a pretty fair characterization of the tenor of their arguments.) It’s not until late in the game that D’Agata engages Fingal in a substantive discussion of what he’s trying to do, best stated as “taking liberties” to make “a better work of art — and thus a better experience for the reader — than I could if I just stuck to the facts.”

The bonehead comments-thread response to this assertion is “There’s a name for that: fiction.” But there are enough confirmed facts in “What Happens There” — real names, people, places and events — that it doesn’t constitute fiction, either. Of course, the whole dispute could be fairly easily defused by labeling D’Agata’s work as a lyric essay and including an editor’s note (for the many readers as yet unfamiliar with the genre) explaining that it contains factual material but is not restricted to factual material. That describes most contemporary poetry, after all. A magazine like Harper’s might decide that it isn’t comfortable publishing prose works of this kind, but no reader could claim to have been misled.

Such a reasonable solution, however, would severely reduce the opportunities to grandstand about how today’s readers don’t “have enough deep experiences with art to know that that is what art is for: to break us open, to make us raw, to destabilize our understanding of ourselves and of our world so that we can experience both anew, with fresh eyes,” and so on. (Why is it that people defending purportedly innovative art always seem to fall back on the most shopworn cliches and the hokiest Romantic-hero narratives to do so?) D’Agata’s rhetoric in this section of “The Lifespan of a Fact” is so overblown in comparison to the substance of his quarrels with Fingal that the effect is comical. The freedom to remove a “clunky” comma from the name of a school or to “streamline” quotes from a newspaper interview seems unlikely to catapult a piece from a pedestrian bit of reporting to a “an enactment of the experience of trying to find meaning.”

Nevertheless, a case can be made for what D’Agata wants to do, and in his defense he maintains throughout “The Lifespan of a Fact” that he doesn’t claim to write “nonfiction” or “journalism,” and has never espoused or promised factual accuracy in his essays. However, he is (in “What Happens There”) writing about the death of a real person, a boy named Levi Presley, and Fingal suggests that the “gravity” of this subject urges greater fidelity to accuracy in each detail. D’Agata replies, “The important thing here is the search for meaning … I am seeking truth here, but not necessarily accuracy.”

Here is the crux of the matter and one in which fact checking plays an overlooked role. When I first read “What Happens Here,” long before I became aware of D’Agata’s provocateur status, I could barely finish it, and abandoned the rest of the book. The authorial voice was insufferable — preening and self-important. Many writers are indeed vain, but the good ones are able to keep this from infecting their work. Vanity has the effect of blinding an artist to the very truths D’Agata intends to pursue.

No genre scourges a writer’s delusions of grandeur and omnipotence more fiercely than nonfiction. The fact checker is its whip. Yes, as Fingal discovers in the final pages of “The Lifespan of a Fact,” even official records can contradict each other and sometimes the truth is impossible to determine. But most of the friction between D’Agata and Fingal in “The Lifespan of a Fact” doesn’t involved disputed facts, only aesthetically inconvenient ones. D’Agata would prefer that his interpretation and depiction of reality not be encumbered by having to accommodate such facts. He thinks his essays are better because he refuses to do so.

What effect does it have on a writer to be constantly confronted with facts that interfere with his or her stories about the world? It can certainly be maddening, as many a writer subjected to the ministrations of an overzealous fact checker can testify. It can mean 30-minute conversations about utterly meaningless quibbles. Fact checkers can also save your ass, a service that may not mean much to someone like D’Agata, who doesn’t care about being accurate, but which I have deeply appreciated every time I’ve benefited from it.

Mostly, however, fact checking — not just the experience of being fact-checked but often the mere expectation of it — makes you pay more attention to the world around you. It compels you to stop insisting on what you want things to be and to come to terms with what they are. It is, above all, a humbling experience, a perpetual process of correction that, far from instilling a false sense of certainty, makes you ever more alert to the myriad ways you can screw things up by falling in love with your own ideas or accepting a conventional truth at face value.

To me, this seems far more likely to break a person open and destabilize his understanding of himself and the world than hopping on D’Agata’s magic carpet ride of Art. The pity is that more nonwriters aren’t subjected to fact checking. It may not be fun, but it’s good for you.