[Kallisto Gaia Press; 2025]
In the 1970’s, a clutch of American writers began to use real life public figures as characters in their novels. Harry Houdini and J.P Morgan featured in E.L Doctorow’s Ragtime, Warren Harding and the Harlem Renaissance writers were amongst the characters in Ishamael Reed’s, Mumbo Jumbo. And then there was Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, narrated by Richard Nixon and mysteriously moved from bookshelves after dipping its toes in the bestseller list. A 1977 review of The Public Burning referred to this new trend of novel as “historical fantasia… that show real people participating in, if not imaginary history, then at least mythologized, broke up and recast into forms that may better indicate why it seems so horrifying.” The trend for recasting history and significant figures therein has remained ever since, but recent works, such as Lance Olsen’s Bowie book Always Crashing in the Same Car, and Emily Greenberg’s Alternative Facts are finding new ways to work beyond genre, using news reports, TV interviews, biography, blending real and invented worlds to question history, rather than rewrite it. The reader never truly knows what to believe.
Greenberg is a multimedia artist and filmmaker whose work investigates what she refers to as “the fictions we mistake for reality.” As such, it’s difficult to read Alternative Facts, her debut collection, without succumbing to an urge to google something on every page. At various points, I sat my copy down to tap on my phone:
Paris+Hilton+falling+out+of+helicopter
George+Bush+portrait+artist
punch+up+Conway+inauguration
Greenberg, in her afterword, asks readers not to view the seven stories in Alternative Facts as “journalism, biography, history, or as truthful, accurate, objectively factual depictions of individuals, places, events, or other entities.” Yet most of the stories are the progeny of all of the above, with sources from newspapers, books, television, each referenced and explained. The reader must move beyond what they know to be true and accept a synthesis of fiction and non-fiction that produces something new, existing in itself, possibly unrelated to the source. It turns out, I didn’t need to google anything, because Alternative Facts exists outside of any known realities.
In the opening, titular story, Kellyanne Conway, who famously coined the phrase “alternative facts,” reveals, in one long, unfurling sentence, during the inaugural Liberty ball, a denial of all that she has done to achieve her role in Trump’s first presidency, and how she had not really stepped in to stop a fight and punched a tuxedo-d man three times in the face, just as she had “not worn the red, white and blue, cat-buttoned Gucci coat” she was pictured in. These alternative facts, presented as a rebuttal of actuality, a reminder of Trump’s post-truth agenda, plays cleverly to what lies ahead, a series of so-called alternative facts: the definition of fiction. It’s a bravura beginning to the collection that feels playful and transgressive.
Greenberg weaves elements of biography into many of her stories, maybe to re-evaluate, or provide a previously hidden internality to divisive figures, to humanize those considered to be lacking humanity. “Black Box” uses the perhaps true life story of behavioral psychology pioneer B.F. Skinner to explain his fascination with the evisceration of free will. The story is told with tender clarity in the form of compressed compartments, much like Skinner’s famous boxes: glass chambers where rats responses to conditioning were observed. Another contentious figure, George W. Bush, appears on a chat show, where he discusses, with host Jay Leno, his post-presidency occupation of portraiture, while the story reflects on Dubya’s Texan childhood and the death of his brother at a young age. Rather like Coover did with Nixon, Greenberg depicts these figures with sympathy, at times poignancy, yet never with forgiveness. Dubya cannot “feign remorse” he will not reveal any painful truth about himself. Instead, he is able to place himself with the people, an everyman whose smiles suggests he is: “a guy we can forgive tonight.”
Other stories are inspired by reported events, such as the false alert of an incoming ballistic missile attack on Hawaii. Intercut with comically thwarted attempts by officials to inform residents of the mistake, President Trump plays golf, hungry and unaware of the call for Hawaii to be evacuated, while scenes from the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show, about a man unwittingly living his life as reality TV, are also pocketed within the text. Opposing realities slide amongst each other. Like Schrödinger’s Cat, two incompatible states exist at the same time, as they did in Hawaii, as they did in The Truman Show, worlds both real and unreal, reflecting the phenomenological experience of a subjective truth. Something similar happens in the story, “From the Eyes of Travelers,” where a photojournalist, a war photographer, witnesses the assassination of Andrei Karlov, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, at an art exhibition in Ankara. The role of the captured image is countered by the role of the photographer who does not flee or go in search for her friends, but creates a future truth, the truth that is witnessed by others who were not there, she finds the truth while missing the reality, or is it other way round? The blur between a truth and a reality is what enables these stories, and others in the collection, to slip doubt inside the readers minds, to thrilling effect.
The most outstanding story in Alternative Facts, is “The Author and the Heiress,” a seventy-page extravaganza of wild invention and fan fiction, beginning with a meet cute between Paris Hilton and Thomas Pynchon. When Paris Hilton falls out of a helicopter, on her way to gate crash Kim Kardashian’s birthday party and reclaim her right to extreme fame, she lands on the fire escape of Thomas Pynchon’s New York apartment. The famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon does not recognize Paris Hilton, who is now missing a tooth and has a lisp. “Who are you? The question launched shivers down her spine.” The unlikeliest of duos schlep around Manhattan, encountering characters from Pynchon’s novel V. Fans of the novel, like me, will be thrilled by the description of Pynchon and Hilton being rescued from albino alligators in the sewer by V’s protagonist, Benny Profane. Alligators in the sewers was Pynchon’s own play with alternative facts. After getting Paris’ tooth fixed by another one of V.’s characters, the soul dentist, the pair visits a bar and dance and eventually get to the club where Kardashian is hosting. They are helped in by Joaquin Phoenix, dressed as the Pynchon character Doc Sportello, filming a Netflix series where he searches for the buck-toothed author. All of this layering, the carnivalization of the story, as Bakhtin liked to refer to the use of a variety of form and expression, somehow manages to speak a new truth, an alternative fact that is not true and yet is not false. With their contrasting approach to exposure, on the surface Tom and Paris are the ultimate odd couple, yet both share a desire to remain hidden, one behind fame, the other anonymity. Like so many of the characters and stories in Alternative Facts, the presentation of image and person, whether it’s Dubya’s appearance on a chatshow or photographs of an assassination, is never real. Imaginary characters, imaginary lives, rumor and tittle tattle, reports and research. This is what connects Tom and Paris, a linkage that means they eventually become, of course, BFF.
Through a vertiginous lens of fact and fiction, Greenberg seems to move beyond notions of truth and history, landing in a place where everything is a fact, in the same way everything is a fiction. This is the new way of telling a story, and it’s also the oldest.
Simon Lowe is a British writer. His stories have appeared in EX/Post, Breakwater Review, AMP, Akashic Books online, Ponder Review, and elsewhere. His novel, The World is at War, Again, was published June 2021 (Elsewhen Press).
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