Will David Carr's Night Of The Gun Save The Memoir?

t's not immediately clear when you get to the end of NYT columnist David Carr's new book, The Night of the Gun, whether you've just seen the memoir redeemed or irrevocably dismantled. A work of traditional reportage motivated by the fashionable and unnerving notion that it's impossible to really know anything for sure, Mr. Carr's book--which arrives in bookstores next week--turns the traditional memoir on its head, assuming as it does that its author knows nothing about his own life and must research it as though it were someone else's. The book practically interrogates itself, questioning its own right to exist even as Mr. Carr vigilantly gathers string on the dark and druggy life he led into his 30s. Are any of the glitchy, fractured memories he has from those days true? Are his sources--the dealers who sold him his cocaine, the friends who watched with horror as he injected it into his veins, the fellow junkies who stood over stoves with him while he cooked it into crack--any more reliable?

Mr. Carr thinks they are, but only when their recollections are considered in relation to each other's. "You can't know the whole truth," as he puts it, "but if there is one it lies in the space between people."

The truth is out there, in other words, but it's in pieces. And if we want to understand ourselves, our world, what happened, and what might, every effort must be taken to reconstruct it. This is the guiding principle of Mr. Carr's book, and at a time when the idea that facts actually matter seems to have disappeared into the vortex of the Bush Administration, James Frey and Margaret Jones, it is, unmistakably, a rallying cry.

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Comments

[mediamarv]

Will this story ever leave HuffPo??

So old news.....

[cheesypoofs]

Will Carr's book save the memoir genre? Oh, come on, don't you know that Bill O'Reilly's " A Bold Fresh Piece of Something or Another" is single-handedly going to do that?

LOL, just joking. Mr. Carr's book sounds very intriguing. I look forward to reading it...something that rarely happens when it comes to memoirs.

[johnnynyc]

I've read excerpts from this book and found them to be engrossing. Comparing what he thought was going on in his life as an addict to what those around him thought really does work as a literary device.

Previously I thought Carr was just the loopy reporter who does video reports on awards shows like the Oscars and Emmys for the NYT.

Then a couple of weeks ago after Fox News photoshopped the pics of a couple of NYT reporters Carr wrote an article about his previous dealings with Fox.

Right after that the excerpts of this book were published.

My respect for Mr. Carr's work has grown and I'm thinking the Times would do well to let him write for the print and online editions as often as possible.