Nicholas Lemann received critical acclaim for his book “The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How It Changed America,” a best-selling history of the migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North, particularly Chicago. With his most recent book, “The Big Test,” Lemann takes on another big idea: achievement and opportunity in America. Literary editor Elizabeth Taylor spoke with Lemann while he was in town recently:
Q. Did you think there was another way to get at the question of meritocracy, or did you always know it was going to be through the Educational Testing Service (ETS)?
A. I was prepared to have to find another way at it besides ETS. What I was really interested in at the outset was, not so much meritocracy, as the subject of success and individual opportunity in America, which is very broad.
Just as an aside to that question, I work differently from most non-fiction writers in that I tend to start with the general and work my way down to the particular. Most people start with a story and then work out.
So I had this very broad interest in success and opportunity, and I just couldn’t figure out how to make it into a book because I couldn’t figure out what the story was. I surmised somewhere along the way that you have this kind of big, shaggy subject–success and opportunity–that America has always been obsessed with, and then somewhere, someone decided or figured out a way to structure it, create a formal system for distributing success, so that then that would be a story. So the formal system is really what we call meritocracy. So, it was defining the subject, going one level down from the superbroad thing about success to the idea of a kind of structure and how it was built. That’s what I’m saying when I say meritocracy. And then once I defined it that way, then the next step is to go to ETS (to research the book). And had ETS said no (to allowing access to its records), I would have figured out some other way to do it, I think, but they said yes. So that became a starting point.
Q. Does this kind of approach distinguish journalism from a book of non-fiction?
A. No, I think it’s just the particular way my mind works, because most of my colleagues in the non-fiction writing biz do it the opposite way. And the general thing you’ll hear from people is, first find a great story, find a yarn, and then work out from that into the larger implications. What I seem to do more is find a theme that really gets to me and then look for the story in it. So it’s not particular to book writing, and some books work wonderfully well, you know, when they don’t have any larger theme.
Q. Did any previous books serve as models?
A. I’m going to give you a lot of rambling answers to this question. First there’s a short answer. One model is the “U.S.A.” trilogy, by John Dos Passos–the idea of a lot of little set pieces and switching back and forth between different stories.
A book that I’m very, very, very, very influenced by and admire tremendously is “Common Ground,” by Anthony Lukas. The one thing I was frustrated by with that book is that it’s so close in that it doesn’t have a way to discuss the pluses and minuses of busing really. In other words, you finish the book, and you can’t tell whether he thinks busing was a good idea or not. So, pushing off from there, I wanted to find some way in which you could get a little more into the question of analyzing the merits, while keeping it in narrative form.
Another thing about “Common Ground” is he used brilliantly this technique that I will call the braid technique, where you create these three families and then you braid them all together, so you keep switching between three story lines. And, you follow them all from the beginning to the end. That’s a good way to do non-fiction. I didn’t think it would work for me in this project.
Q. Why not?
A. Because, I’m trying to cover too much ground here. I wanted a story that started with the creation of ETS but got all the way across to the other end of the country across a span of 50 years. I wanted to cover ETS, wanted to cover Ivy League universities growing meritocratic. I wanted to cover a state university going meritocratic. I wanted to give the life stories of people growing up in this system. And I wanted to have the whole history of affirmative action and political conflict around this system. So, if you want to do all that in one book, you can’t braid–or I couldn’t figure out how to braid–because there’s a certain limit to how many characters the mind can follow through a whole book.
So what I came up with is something I call the baton technique: You introduce a character, and then that character meets another character and passes the baton, and then that person becomes the next character and follows the action forward through the book, and then passes to another character. So it’s a little bit like “U.S.A.,” because he keeps returning to people. And I don’t know if this even plays as you’re reading the book, but what I was extremely preoccupied with and what took a huge amount of time was building links. Everything in the book is linked to the next thing, specifically. And it takes time to find the characters. I had fabulous characters who just didn’t link into the other characters, so I couldn’t use them.
An easier way to do it would be just to say, OK, we’ve talked about ETS, now I’m gonna just talk about Ohio State University, just because I want to talk about a state university. There’s no direct connection, I’m just gonna switch the scene. And it could be, just to play the devil’s advocate to myself, that nobody would notice that there was no link.
Q. Were the roots of this technique in “The Promised Land”?
A. Well, yes and no. That was a problem I had with “The Promised Land,” one reason why I wanted to try this. I was interested in some of this linking stuff, clearly, but in fact, the characters in “The Promised Land” didn’t link. In other words, Ruby Hanes never meets George Hicks, and Ulis Carter never meets either of them. So, I’m telling stories of disconnected people, who never met each other, even though they’re living the same story. “The Promised Land” is a book about a subject that’s a natural narrative subject, a thing that actually happened in the world. So it supplies its own propulsive course forward as a narrative.
This story is tougher, and it’s more artificial in a sense, because it’s really a book about an abstract idea. The effort is in turning the abstract idea into a story with characters and a plot. And that’s why the linking is more important, because we don’t want to interrupt that artifice; it’s like showing people what’s backstage at the play.
