Other people’s stories

WE are supposed to acknowledge their humanity, at the very least. We are supposed to look the homeless directly in the eye as we fumble -- or don’t -- for spare change, a crumpled bill. Many of us simply offer up the muttered “sorry” as we quicken our pace, our eyes averted in shame, guilt and fear. Because eye-to-eye contact is frightening -- it’s exactly our shared humanity that we scuttle away from, the thing we are most afraid to acknowledge by direct gaze.

Don’t avert your eyes from Alexander Masters’ biography “Stuart: A Life Backwards” or Tobias Hecht’s “After Life: An Ethnographic Novel,” two accounts of homelessness quite different in form but similarly powerful in their insights and delights. Yes, delights. Hilarious is not a word one usually associates with homelessness. But Masters’ account of meeting and befriending Stuart Shorter, a homeless man on the streets of Cambridge, England, where the author was a doctoral candidate, is aided and authenticated by his subject’s hilarious voice. Masters initially struggled to find the tone and structure for his book -- how do you form a coherent story out of a chaotic life? Stuart, after reading what he deemed a boring first draft, provided the hook: “Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was? See? Write it backwards.”

And so Masters starts with the Stuart he knows -- homeless, belligerent, dirty, alcoholic, drug-addicted, violent, the guy we fear will stab us in the back with a shiv if we don’t hand over a few coins -- and reveals his earlier life as we go along, hoping to solve the mystery: “At what point does a person change from being outside his house to being outside all houses? When does he go from being one of us to one of them?” This Pinteresque gimmick is potentially problematic, threatening to reduce the complex puzzle of homelessness to mere formula; if X+Y = homelessness, then surely this societal problem can be solved by changing a variable or two. (It also lets us recalculate the equation of our lives for reassurance that our personal math will never add up to such a result.)

The gimmick also inevitably hypes expectation for the Big Reveal, the instant everything changed in Stuart’s life. Hearing the story backward, though, we identify with the disturbing Stuart; it strips any pity or sterilizing sentimentality away and forces us to look at the real man: “thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopathic street raconteur, my spy on how the British chaotic underclass spend their troubled days at the beginning of the twenty-first century: a man with an important life.” It’s a daring gimmick, not an easy one. By the end (the beginning?) of the story, the melodramatic ta-da moment and the photo of sweet-faced baby boy Stuart are all the more wrenching, especially given his death on a London train track.

Despite Masters’ detective agenda, he knows there is no easy answer: “I can’t hope to justify or explain Stuart, I realize, nursing my headache: just staple him to the page.” He is honest enough to acknowledge his ambivalence about this man he has come to love -- he hesitates to leave Stuart alone in his flat, yet he acknowledges he doesn’t really want this violent guy out on the street -- and so we trust this introduction, we agree to this blind date to tea set up by a trustworthy friend.

Just as compelling as the “murder mystery” are Stuart’s tales, punctuated by Masters’ prompts and Stuart’s insistence on telling his own story in his own way. And Stuart is hilarious. He’s a witty and dramatic raconteur with a profane Cockney voice, a charismatic gleam and a gift for relating the most horrifying events -- things done both to him and by him -- without excuse or self-pity. Is he always telling the truth about his circumstances? He’s an addict, after all, and Masters knows that addicts will lie to feed their addiction. It doesn’t make any difference. Stuart’s determination to live a life grounded in some principle deserves our attention. Listen to this man. Look him in the eye.

Although larger than life, Stuart Shorter was a real person. Aparecita, the homeless transgender prostitute in “After Life,” is a fictional character, yet Hecht writes in an introduction that her story is inspired by a real-life subject. While researching his dissertation on Brazilian street children, Hecht met an adolescent girl, Bruna, whose artistic nature, humorous voice and articulate stories of abuse and street life intrigued him. He taught Bruna to keep a journal and recorded multiple interviews with her, hoping to “carry out the research in a collaborative and egalitarian fashion.” He came to realize, in time, that much of what she told him wasn’t necessarily factual, and yet it was all true. Hence, his decision to novelize her story: “The only way to do justice to her life, it seemed to me, was to yield to her inventions.”

Henry James said that the fiction writer and the historian have essentially the same charge -- the accurate representation of truth -- yet the fiction writer has more trouble collecting his evidence. So I wonder why Hecht, given the inherent drama of Bruna’s story, the depth of her character and experience, his acknowledgment and awareness of her elastic sense of “reality” and his fidelity to the principles of ethnography, made that decision to complicate his task.

As Stuart does in Masters’ book, Aparecita tells much of her story; entire chapters are her vibrant first-person testimony, and we can assume that these are the “narrations of Bruna Verissimo” that Hecht credits. He does justice to her story every time he lets Aparecita (Bruna?) speak.

The most obviously fictional element of the book is the main character, Zoe, an anthropologist who is visiting Brazil and whose relationship with Aparecita parallels Hecht’s account of his experiences with Bruna. Zoe is struggling to heal from a recent hysterectomy and her mother’s death; despite a nice psychological through-line of Zoe attempting to find renewed meaning by helping “give birth” to a new Aparecita, her story is by far the less interesting. Perhaps Hecht felt a “novel” needed this extra narrative layer (or that his experience lacked metaphor), but I found my thoughts wandering back to the “real” stories of Bruna/Aparecita.

Both books, biography and novel, acknowledge the scientist’s valid concern about entering his or her own experiment, and both narrators, real and fictional, struggle with the sense of liberal guilt they feel regarding their fear of violence, their right to tell another person’s story and the overwhelming sense of responsibility to fellow human beings.

Although Masters and Hecht/Zoe struggle to understand why their characters at times refuse help, they come to realize and appreciate the self-determination that dignifies both Stuart and Aparecita -- and that their ultimate responsibility, as narrators of these tales, is to remind us of our shared humanity.