I’m not usually a fan of novels that are overtly based upon some real-life figure or incident or life-story. There are exceptions: I thought a couple of the recent Patty Hearst-inspired novels, Susan Choi’s
American Woman and Christopher Sorrentino’s
Trance, were both tops. In general, though, it always seems like author & reader alike are compelled to keep comparing the invented world on the page with the historical record, or at least with our understanding of it.
Of course, some real-life mysteries do cry out for the kind of experiential imaginative creation that you can find best in fiction. The aforementioned death of Bobby Fuller
might be one, though the trick for the novelist would be to make the details of what happened, the chain of events that led to the bruises and the gasoline-seared throat and the half-hearted police investigation, genuinely fascinating & illuminating rather than just tawdry & titillating.
Another episode that cries out for a fictional recasting, maybe a short story rather than a novel, is
the case of Syd Barrett. Not the early days of Pink Floyd and the altered states and the mental convulsions – everybody already knows about that stuff. But the hermit days, the latter two or three decades, how he spent his time & what he was like.
That’s something, it seems to me, that should appeal to a storyteller interested in consciousness (which is to say a fiction writer). Partly because there are so few scraps of available information here in the real world, and partly because the ones that do exist tend to get mentally sorted into one of two unsatisfactory piles – here’s the crater-brained, scary-eyed burnout, and there’s the quaint country gentleman. (For the latter, see the end of Jody Rosen’s Slate
obituary: “It sounds like a pretty nice life, actually, and it's pleasant to think of Barrett ending his days as a vaguely Victorian figure – an odd old Englishman who'd made quite a splash in his youth, tottering through town on two wheels.”)
There would, of course, be less raw conflict to work with; with Bobby Fuller, at least, you could fall back on tawdry & titillating, which have their own pleasures, if not exactly lasting rewards. But even though a Barrett story might risk plain boredom or banality if it doesn’t come off, it seems to me that the mind & personality of that person in that situation would be a fascinating thing. (Though you never know; Barrett’s reality might very well have been boring or banal indeed. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, at least when we’re talking life not fiction.)
- Syd Barrett, “Baby Lemonade”
(Buy some Barrett
here.)
