Best selling government REPORTS - literature or not?

Robert Mueller's Magnum Opus

This article is about "best seller" government investigation reports, beginning with the publication of the 1964, Warren Commission Report, after the assassination of President John Kennedy. The author challenges these publications as, perhaps,"not real literature". 

 Published in the April 8, 2019, in The New Yorker by Tyler Foggatt.

Maine Writer commentary here - The truth behind John Kennedy's assassination will not be revealed in my lifetime. Likewise, I believe the same is true about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. In both murders, we know the name of the assassins, but the motivation behind the killings have never been completely revealed. (Just my opinion.)  Nevertheless, Foggatt's article is interesting because it raises the question about what people read and why they read it. "A puzzlement".

Yul Brynner (1920-1985) "In my head are many facts; Of which I wish I was more certain, I was sure, Is a puzzlement" by Rogers and Hammerstein

"These are exciting books,” Johnson said. “They remind you of the power of a book and its place in our democracy.” Lyons said.
Robert Mueller, Best-Seller?
Three publishers are racing to print the account of Mueller's Russia investigation, following in the footsteps of classic page-turners from the Warren Commission and Kenneth Starr.

The Mueller report has been awaited with more excitement than—and for three times as long as—Princess Meghan Markle’s baby.

Now that the special counsel’s report is here, sort of, three publishers have announced plans to release it as a book:

• Skyhorse, with an introduction by Alan Dershowitz; 
• Scribner, with supplementary material by Washington Post reporters; and 
• Melville House, straight up. (The document will be in the public domain.) 

“Our printers are ready to print faster than usual,” Dennis Johnson, Melville House’s co-founder and co-publisher, said last week, over the phone. “And we’ll ask the truck drivers to do at least the speed limit to deliver the book.” Tony Lyons, the president and publisher of Skyhorse, said that he’d received thousands of pre-orders, and he’s been touting his edition’s Dershowitz bonus. “Alan was right from Day One,” he said. “He was the only pundit whose cautious predictions proved to be correct.”

The first government report published as a trade book was the Warren Commission’s 1964 report on J.F.K.’s assassination, which sold more than a million copies. In his novel “Libra,” Don DeLillo calls the report “the megaton novel that James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.” Three decades later, the independent counsel Kenneth Starr, with help from Brett Kavanaugh, authored the Starr report, which three different publishers released as a four-hundred-plus-page potboiler. (It sold almost two million copies in two days.)

Adam Gopnik, in this magazine, argued that the Starr report could be read “as a novel in the classic tradition,” with Bill Clinton as the scapegrace hero. Others likened the work to soft-core porn. Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian, asked, “Why did Starr and Kavanaugh put all the sex in it? Well, they didn’t do it to sell a lot of copies.” Gopnik acknowledged, “The laboriously recounted instances of near-ejaculation, the orgasms achieved and enumerated—it’s all there for the reviewers.”

Then came the 9/11 Commission Report, a doorstop of nearly six hundred pages, written in what the Post called the “ultra-spare, purposely unemotional—yet quietly seething—language of American pain.” The Harvard historian Daniel Aaron, the librettist Leslie Dunton-Downer, and the lawyer Harvey Silverglate went further, arguing in a 2005 article that the literary genre that the 9/11 report belongs to is the epic. The terrorists are our Grendel, and the Twin Towers, like Heorot, are “too lofty and too visible” for their own good. “Bereft of a miraculous rescuer like Beowulf,” the authors write, “the 9/11 Commission Report calls on the American people to serve as their own collective hero.”

The report sold more than a million copies in the first four months, and, in 2004, it was named a finalist in the nonfiction category of the National Book Awards, cited for its “literary style.”

Sketchpad: To pass the time as we wait for the Mueller report to be released to the reading public, we asked five graphic designers to create book covers for the special counsel’s masterwork, twenty-­two months in the making, which is said to weigh in at more than three hundred pages. This one was designed by Michael Bierut.

Harold Bloom, the eminent Yale literature professor, finds the idea of such reports having literary merit offensive. “If a Harvard professor thought that the 9/11 report could be compared to ‘Beowulf,’ they achieved an abyss of absurdity,” he wrote in an e-mail. As for the Warren Commission report, he said, “I am very fond of Don and of ‘Libra,’ but there are limits: Joyce in Iowa City is like visualizing the eighty-nine-year-old Harold Bloom climbing mountains in Tibet.”

Stephen Greenblatt, a professor at Harvard and Bloom’s sometime rival in Shakespeare criticism, was more open to the idea of the Mueller report as literature. “Quite a large number of people have been indicted. Some of them are going to jail,” he said. “I would have thought those individual instances would be quite gripping, both as stories and as outcomes.”

If the Warren report is a modern novel, the Starr report a bodice ripper, and the 9/11 report an epic, then which genre will the Mueller report fall into—assuming we ever get to read it? “Like a lot of people, I was led to believe that the Mueller report might resemble Richard Condon’s ‘Manchurian Candidate,’ ” Greenblatt said. “But I gather from the Attorney General’s letter that it’s most likely to resemble a postmodern novel, like DeLillo’s ‘White Noise’—one in which there isn’t a big bang at the end.” Wilentz had doubts that the Mueller report would be nominated for a literary prize. “It’d be a political statement, in a way that nominating the 9/11 report was not,” he said. “Regardless of what the report says.”

But, the publishers are more optimistic. “These are exciting books,” Johnson said. “They remind you of the power of a book and its place in our democracy.” Lyons said, “The reports that have been released in the past have been of the highest quality. I have no reason to believe that the Mueller report would be any different.”

But Greenblatt is skeptical that Americans will be racing to the bookstore to purchase the next “Infinite Jest.” “If the report turns out to be a postmodern novel with interesting and complex threads that go in different directions but don’t lead into a grand, clear narrative, then it’ll probably have less appeal,” he said. “More like something that people would just look at online.”

Tyler Foggatt is a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.