Read this: “In Defense of Fact Checking,” Laura Miller, Salon.

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.

(Gulp.)

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.”

Nice, John.

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.

There has to be a middle ground somewhere, right?

I side with John, I do. But I’m not against Fingal, either. (I am, I should say, against this article. Because it sounds like a toddler, whining, yelling. Because she hates John. Or because she didn’t get her way. Or both.) 

Here’s the thing: I have no issue with John’s decision to change ‘thirty-one’ strip clubs to ‘thirty-four.’ And I don’t have an issue with John’s decision to take a native of Nevada and say, well, no, she’s actually a native of Mississippi and she moved to Nevada at a later date and she feels like an outsider now. Because, I don’t know, what does that change? He’s not turning her into an astronaut. He’s not taking a real, live person and saying that, hey, you know the kid who committed suicide in this book, in this essay? well, actually, my imagined native-woman-from-Nevada killed him, okay? He’s not lying. But, he’s not telling the truth. (Sometimes.)

But, but, but, but: he’s not betraying the core of his story, about a boy and a family in Nevada, about life in Nevada, about Nevada as a state. And a lot of people think that’s okay. And a lot of people think that is the opposite of okay. And a lot of people fall somewhere in the middle, unsure of what they think until they feel (or read) something that doesn’t agree with their own core. Which is fine. That’s fine. Read a book however you want to read a book.

I was taught to write and read nonfiction like John writes and reads nonfiction by John himself, and by others who came around to the same idea on their own, or at the hand of another professor at another university. I’m taking a class with a woman, right now, who firmly believes in The Line. And it’s difficult. She’d say, “Are there thirty-one strip clubs in the city?” And you’d have to say, “Yes,” because there are. And then she’d say, “Then write thirty-one.” 

Still, in the same class, we just finished reading William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” which flawlessly and beautifully switches from an account of nonfiction to an imagined reality - or, we’ll say, fiction. My professor sells and teaches and presents the book as nonfiction. And says, “Well, the things Maxwell made up? Those are nonfiction.” But, they’re imagined. He writes: “If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the readers as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any.” 

On Tuesday, I had to present on Maxwell’s switch from nonfiction to fiction and, at the end, I posed the question: What happens to the book, to the story, to Maxwell, if his readers heed his suggestion and disregard half of the book? 

There’s capital-T truth, and there’s capital-N nonfiction, and there’s a whole mess of literature and life in between. And what happens when you make the line so solid that you lose everything you cannot - never, no matter how hard you try - define?