Can you write about someone you cannot understand?

Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary and what happens when a writer cannot find the explanation

Writers explain things. Even when they don't announce it, it is one of the basic pleasures they offer us. It's why we love to read. They take the mess of experience and give it shape. They decide where a story begins, which details matter, and how one event relates to another. 

In nonfiction especially, we tend to assume that if a writer has spent years researching a person, interviewing people who knew them, and examining the evidence of their life, they will eventually be able to tell us who that person really was. But what happens if they can't? 

What if the writer reaches the end of the research and the person at the centre of the book remains incomprehensible? An enormous temptation is to fill the gap. Find the childhood trauma. Identify the humiliation. Discover the secret resentment. Locate the moment when everything went wrong. Give the reader the psychological key that makes the behaviour on either side of it click satisfyingly into place.

And if no such key exists? Perhaps one of the hardest things a writer can put on the page is: I don't know. That is the problem Emmanuel Carrère faced when he began trying to write The Adversary.

Another writer, another murderer

We've been heading towards Carrère for a while now after first asking the question: can you ever really trust a writer with Rachel Cusk , and Joan Didion's words from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Writers are always selling somebody out). Truman Capote takes a real murderer and makes us feel that we understand him. Perry Smith becomes the emotional centre of In Cold Blood, and Capote uses all the machinery of the novelist to bring us remarkably close to his subject. Norman Mailer tries something different in The Executioner's Song, stepping back and letting the accumulated voices and details of Gary Gilmore's life create their own enormous portrait. Hunter S. Thompson gives up on the supposedly objective narrator altogether and makes his own unreliability part of the story.

Then Janet Malcolm changes the question. In The Journalist and the Murderer, she asks us to look at the relationship that makes nonfiction possible in the first place. What happens when a subject trusts a writer? What does that intimacy allow the writer to discover? And what happens when the writer eventually turns that intimacy into material?

Carrère inherits all of those problems. But he adds another, because the subject he wanted to write about had spent almost his entire adult life lying about who he was.

Jean-Claude Romand therefore presented Carrère with a particularly nasty version of the nonfiction writer's problem. How do you reconstruct somebody's inner life when the person himself may be the least reliable source you have? 

How do you explain a life built around deception without simply accepting the deceiver's explanation for it? And if you cannot finally explain him, can you still write the book? Carrère initially wasn't sure that he could.

The book Carrère couldn't write

Carrère became fascinated by the Romand case soon after it happened. Seven months later, he wrote to Romand in prison, explaining that he wanted to try to understand what had happened and make a book from it. That sentence contains almost the entire problem.

Try to understand.

Carrère wasn't approaching the case simply because it was sensational. He wanted to find a form that could make sense of it. But the form refused to appear. Romand didn't respond at first, and Carrère found himself unable to write the book he had imagined. The material instead haunted the edges of his work, with some of that fascination finding its way into his novel Class Trip.

Years passed. Then Romand read Class Trip and contacted Carrère. Now Carrère had something he hadn't had before: access to the man himself. The two began corresponding. Carrère visited him. The writer could finally ask the subject what he had thought, what he had felt and what it had been like to inhabit the extraordinary life that had brought them together.

Which should have solved the problem. Instead, it made the problem worse because this series has already taught us to be suspicious of exactly this moment.

Janet Malcolm is still in the room

After The Journalist and the Murderer, it is impossible to look innocently at a writer beginning a correspondence with a murderer.

Joe McGinniss gained extraordinary access to Jeffrey MacDonald while writing Fatal Vision. MacDonald believed the writer understood him and sympathised with his account. McGinniss eventually became convinced of MacDonald's guilt, and Janet Malcolm turned their relationship into one of nonfiction's great ethical problems.

Carrère is now entering his own version of that relationship. He writes to Romand. Romand writes back. They meet. Carrère listens. A relationship develops between the person who wants to understand and the person who wants to be understood.

But Carrère makes a crucial decision. He doesn't hide that relationship from us. The correspondence isn't scaffolding to be removed once the finished book is standing. His fascination with Romand, his uncertainty about him and even his discomfort with his own fascination become part of The Adversary.

The writer doesn't disappear when the writing begins. Carrère puts Emmanuel Carrère into the story, and that takes us directly back to Capote.

The ghost of In Cold Blood

Carrère knew In Cold Blood. Capote's book was one of the obvious models available to any writer trying to turn an extraordinary murder case into literature. But Capote performs a remarkable vanishing act.

He spent years researching the Clutter murders. He travelled to Kansas with Harper Lee. He interviewed Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. His relationship with Smith in particular became intensely complicated. Yet when we open In Cold Blood, Truman Capote has disappeared.

We aren't shown the writer asking the questions. We don't see his uncertainty, and we don't know where Capote was standing when someone told him a particular story.

Instead, the finished book gives us the extraordinary sensation of being everywhere. We enter rooms Capote never entered. We hear conversations he never heard. We enter the minds of people Capote could never have observed at the moments he describes.

We've already asked what that does to our trust in In Cold Blood. Carrère seems to have asked himself something similar.

He initially tried to write the Romand story from outside, but found that removing himself produced something that felt false. His relationship to the material wasn't an unfortunate contamination of the story. It was part of the story. So The Adversary begins by telling us where the writer was.

Where was Emmanuel Carrère?

At the beginning of The Adversary, Carrère places his own ordinary day beside Romand's extraordinary one.

While Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children on 9 January 1993, Emmanuel Carrère was attending a parent-teacher meeting at his son's school. Carrère's son Gabriel was five, the same age as Romand's son Antoine. Carrère then went to lunch with his own parents. Romand also ate with his parents that day before killing them.

It's difficult to imagine In Cold Blood beginning with an account of what Truman Capote happened to be doing while the Clutter family were being murdered.

But Carrère's decision establishes the contract between writer and reader. He is telling us: I am here. This story has passed through me. I chose to investigate it. I became obsessed with it. I wrote to the man responsible. I tried to understand him. What you are about to read isn't an untouched version of reality. It is my attempt to make sense of it.

And, crucially, I cannot make sense of some parts of it. Only now are we ready for Jean-Claude Romand.

The life that didn't exist

For nearly eighteen years, Romand's family believed that he was a doctor. Not merely a doctor, but a successful medical researcher associated with the World Health Organisation in Geneva. His wife believed it. His children believed it. His parents and friends believed it. Dr Jean-Claude Romand's professional identity was woven so completely into their lives that there seemed little reason to question it.

Except there was no Dr Romand. He had attended medical school but never qualified. He didn't work for the WHO. He had no office, no research career, and no group of colleagues who knew him as the man his family believed him to be.

That immediately creates a practical question which becomes strangely disturbing the longer you think about it. What did he do all day?

Romand still had to leave home in the morning. He drove towards Geneva. He passed time in motorway service areas, walked in forests and sat in his car. He collected material from the WHO building and maintained enough medical knowledge to support the fiction. When his supposed work required travel, he could stage a trip and return with presents. He funded his lifestyle partly through money entrusted to him by relatives and acquaintances who believed he could invest it through his professional connections.

And he kept doing it. Year after year. For nearly eighteen years. This is where Carrère encountered something even stranger than a conventional double life. No other exciting Jean-Claude Romand waited to be discovered beneath the respectable doctor. There was no secret profession, hidden family or parallel existence that explained where he went when he left home.

There was mostly empty time.

And for a writer looking for the truth beneath the lie, that emptiness is a terrifying discovery.

What do you put in the empty space?

This, I think, is the real literary problem of The Adversary. A writer naturally wants to fill gaps. If Romand sat alone in his car for hours, we want to know what he thought about. If he walked through forests when everybody believed he was treating patients or attending meetings, we want to know what it felt like to inhabit that deception. Did he experience panic? Shame? Pleasure? Did the invented Dr Romand feel more real to him than the man sitting alone beside a motorway?

A novelist could answer those questions. A nonfiction writer needs evidence, and the most obvious source of evidence was Jean-Claude Romand, which brings Carrère straight back to the problem.

Romand can explain Romand, but why should the writer believe him? If your subject has spent almost two decades manufacturing a false account of himself, his later account of what that deception meant cannot simply be treated as the final layer beneath which truth is waiting.

Perhaps it is true, and perhaps it is another performance. Carrère has no magical way of knowing, and neither do we.

When the story collapsed

Eventually reality began to catch up with the fiction. Romand's supposed career and finances were becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. In January 1993, as exposure threatened, he killed his wife Florence and their children Antoine and Caroline. He then killed his parents, Aimé and Anne-Marie, and attempted to kill a former lover. Afterwards he set fire to the family home and survived.

The case became notorious across France. Romand was tried in 1996 and convicted of the five murders and attempted murder.

But notice what Carrère has to resist. The murders make us want the previous eighteen years to become an explanation.

We look backwards through the lie searching for the thing that will make the violence inevitable. Perhaps if we understand why Romand invented the doctor, we will understand why he killed his family when the invention collapsed.

That's how narrative works. Cause. Effect. Explanation. Carrère doesn't give us that satisfaction.

The temptation to explain evil

True crime loves an explanation because explanation reassures us. A terrible crime occurs and we begin searching backwards through childhood, trauma, money, sex, resentment and humiliation. Somewhere in the past, we hope to find the loose thread that, once pulled, makes the whole terrible thing intelligible.

The explanation gives the writer a story. It also gives the reader distance. This happened because of that. If that isn't present in my life, perhaps I am safely outside the story.

Romand resists that comfort. Carrère is wary of manufacturing a psychological key simply because books work better when the pieces fit together.

That restraint is one of the things I admire most about The Adversary. Carrère doesn't give us a monster and reassure us that monsters are fundamentally different from us. Nor does he give us a neat diagnosis and announce that the murders have therefore been explained.

He keeps returning to what he cannot know.

The adversary

Even the title refuses to make things simpler. The Adversary has a religious meaning. In Christian tradition, the adversary is Satan, and Carrère's book becomes increasingly interested in questions of evil, faith, confession and redemption. Romand embraced Christianity in prison and presented his later life through the language of belief and repentance, which leaves Carrère facing yet another version of the same writing problem.

Is Romand's faith genuine? Has he finally stopped performing? Has the man who spent eighteen years constructing a false identity now discovered an authentic one, or is this simply the latest story Jean-Claude Romand tells about Jean-Claude Romand?

A lesser book might answer. Carrère doesn't. His uncertainty becomes part of what we're reading.

What does Carrère owe Romand?

So Janet Malcolm's question returns. What does a writer owe the person who trusts them? Carrère gives us one possible answer. Not loyalty, approval or control over the finished book. Perhaps the writer owes the subject an honest account of the limits of what can be known.

Carrère was careful that The Adversary did not become Romand's authorised version of his own life. When the manuscript was finished, he allowed Romand to read proofs but maintained control over the book. Access didn't become ownership.

That boundary matters after The Journalist and the Murderer. Carrère has corresponded with Romand, visited him and tried to understand him, but he doesn't pretend that intimacy has granted him privileged access to some final truth. The relationship exists. The boundary exists too, and Carrère lets us see both.

Does showing us the writer solve anything?

Not entirely. It would be easy to turn Carrère into the solution to every writer who has come before him. Capote hides the writer, so Carrère shows him. Mailer tries to step aside, so Carrère acknowledges that stepping aside is impossible. Thompson makes the subjective reporter part of the performance, while Carrère makes his own subjectivity visible without turning himself into the spectacle. Malcolm exposes the compromised relationship between writer and subject, while Carrère incorporates that relationship into the book.

Problem solved. Except Carrère is still a writer. He still chooses which letters we read, which facts matter, where the story begins and where it ends. He still transforms people into characters. Florence, Antoine, Caroline, Aimé and Anne-Marie were people before they became victims in the Jean-Claude Romand story, just as Bonnie and Herbert Clutter, Nancy and Kenyon were people before they became the murdered family in In Cold Blood, and once again, the murderer occupies the centre.

Transparency doesn't eliminate the writer's power. It merely makes some of that power visible. Showing us the camera doesn't mean the camera stops changing what we see.

Thompson told us he was unreliable. Carrère tells us he doesn't know

This is where Hunter S. Thompson unexpectedly returns. Thompson's great joke is that the supposedly objective journalist is obviously unreliable. Raoul Duke is intoxicated, paranoid, excessive and frequently ridiculous. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas doesn't ask us to mistake his perception for an untouched record of reality.

Carrère's uncertainty is much quieter. He isn't saying: don't trust me because I'm unreliable. He is saying: trust me enough to believe me when I tell you what I cannot know.

That may be one of the strangest developments in this whole journey. We started by asking whether writers can be trusted, but perhaps we have been looking for trust in the wrong place.

Maybe we shouldn't trust a nonfiction writer because they persuade us they understand everything. Maybe we trust them when they show us the edges of their understanding.

The writer who leaves the hole in the story

For eighteen years, people believed Jean-Claude Romand was somewhere else. At the hospital. At the World Health Organisation. At a conference. Travelling for work. Meeting colleagues. Doing all the ordinary things that made Dr Romand's story plausible. He wasn't. That absence sits at the centre of The Adversary.

It would have been tempting for Carrère to fill it. He could have given us the definitive psychological portrait of Jean-Claude Romand, the explanation that made eighteen years of deception and five murders cohere into a satisfying narrative. He could have turned the empty hours in motorway service areas and forests into scenes of novelistic certainty.

Capote gave us Perry Smith and made us feel that we understood him. Malcolm warned us to be suspicious of the relationship that produces that understanding.

Carrère confronts something more frightening. Perhaps there are people a writer cannot explain. Perhaps there are lives in which the hole in the middle is not a problem for the writer to solve, but part of the truth the writer has to preserve.

Jean-Claude Romand spent eighteen years inventing a man who didn't exist. Emmanuel Carrère could have invented one more. Instead, he leaves us staring into the space where that man should have been.

Recommended reading

Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary
The essential book for this stage of the journey. Read it not simply as true crime, but as a book about what happens when a writer discovers that research, access and intimacy still aren't enough to explain another human being.

Emmanuel Carrère, Class Trip
The novel Carrère wrote while he was struggling to find a form for the Romand material. It isn't a fictionalisation of the case, but reading it beside The Adversary gives us an intriguing glimpse of a writer circling material before discovering how he needs to write it.

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
The obvious companion. Capote's disappearing-author approach offers Carrère a model he ultimately cannot use. Put the books beside each other and the difference between making a murderer comprehensible and admitting the limits of comprehension becomes striking.

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer
Malcolm makes us suspicious of the intimacy between writer and subject. Carrère takes that compromised relationship and deliberately makes it visible, making these two particularly rewarding books to read consecutively.

Emmanuel Carrère, V13
Decades later, Carrère returned to the problem of writing about real violence in his account of the trial arising from the November 2015 Paris attacks. It offers a fascinating opportunity to see how an older Carrère approaches some of the questions already present in The Adversary.