DISCOVERIES

THE SITUATION AND THE STORY: The Art of Personal Narrative By Vivian Gornick, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 166 pp., $21

Authority can be so seductive. Tell us whom to believe, tell us what to believe, and we’ll believe it. The false note in a narrator’s voice, in a politician’s voice, in a friend’s voice lodges in the back of the brain where the difficult, unprocessed information is stored. It makes a wedge in our receptivity as readers, citizens and friends. How do we recognize truth? How can a writer create a narrator who can be relied upon, without turning the writing into therapy? Vivian Gornick began writing what she calls personal journalism in the 1970s. By this she means “part personal essay and part social criticism.” Personal essay is different from personal narrative, in which a writer exercises less control, less authority, less distance.

By “situation,” Gornick means the context for a piece of fiction or a personal essay. By “story,” she means “the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer.” “In ‘An American Tragedy’ the situation is Dreiser’s America; the story is the pathological nature of hunger for the world.” Wisdom, which is the payoff good writing must deliver, is embedded in the story. But how does the writer achieve the necessary distance that makes the narrator reliable? A writer must engage with the world because “engagement makes experience and experience makes wisdom.” And yet, “without critical detachment, there can be no story; description and response, yes, but no story.”

Condensed this way, the book sounds a bit schoolmarmish, but Gornick writes from decades of thoughtful experience; she dips into the work of Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Edward Hoagland and others. “You can’t teach people how to write,” says this teacher of creative writing, “but you can teach them how to read.”

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THIS COLD HEAVEN: Seven Seasons in Greenland By Gretel Ehrlich, Pantheon: 378 pp., $27.50

Greenland is the largest island in the world. It is 95% surface ice. Sixty thousand people live there, 85% of them Inuit and the rest Danish. In some places, the sun disappears on Oct. 24 and doesn’t reappear until February. Starting in 1993, Gretel Ehrlich returned to Greenland almost once a year, spending several months at a time in the villages of Uummannaq, Qaanaaq and others. Her physical strength and courage alone are inspiring. Ehrlich went with two well-respected hunters on a monthlong hunt by dog sled. She traveled from village to village, sometimes clutching the name of a friend of a friend, sometimes staying with people she met along the way, sometimes not knowing where she would stay.

Most of the time she felt all the joy of a person who has found her place; some of the time she was lonely and uncomfortable with certain (though very few) customs (gathering, for instance, tern eggs to eat, or killing a mother polar bear). But she is never squeamish, not with the Greenlanders’ habits of sleeping together, going to the bathroom in public or even quarreling. She is never judgmental. Sometimes her writing is clear and plain. Sometimes it is poetic: “Today winter was a burning lake and I watched it catch fire.”

Always she abandons herself to the disorientation of darkness and light. The book was inspired, she claims, by the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen, who led several expeditions throughout Greenland in the early 1900s, and also by Rockwell Kent, who lived and painted in Greenland in the 1930s and ‘40s. But her own experience is so much more interesting. On a long trip by dog sled, she thinks: “Once I had everything. Now it’s lost. Then the losing of it was lost. The sled does not move away from one point and toward another. It just glides.”

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ON HUNTING, By Roger Scruton, St. Augustine’s Press: 162 pp., $17

“The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable” is how Oscar Wilde described fox hunting. No sport has been so thoroughly demonized. It’s upper-class snobbism, it’s blatant disregard for other people’s property; a ravaging, stampeding bloodthirstiness for a pathetic, helpless quarry. Roger Scruton grew up in lower-middle-class England with a father who railed against the upper class and hated fox hunting. He watched the “violation of [his] childhood landscape” by developers. His life, he writes, divides in three parts: wretched, ill at ease and hunting. Some time after becoming a Cambridge don, he dropped out. Visiting a friend in the Cotswolds, riding alone, he was overtaken, like Toad in “The Wind in the Willows,” by a hunting party. His horse woke up; he woke up and spent the next 10 years learning the customs: the dress, the habits, the etiquette of the hunt. He likens hunting to dancing; it’s a celebratory event. The fox, as always, gets short shrift in this brief but illuminating entree to a secret society.