So this book won a shit-ton of prizes. Katherine Boo’s decision to depict strict nonfiction/reporting within a novelistic framework is ballsy as hell and hard to do, but she pulled it off perfectly. There are so many pitfalls in this approach and Boo managed to navigate around them all perfectly. Everyone in here comes off as both a real and living human being and a character, but never to the detriment or exclusion of either of those identities. Her authorial chops within the context of nonfiction were already very well established by the Pulitzer, but the knack she has for long-form narrative is even more impressive.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers deals with the daily realities of living in a Mumbai undercity. These slumdwellers are just as fully realized as the inhabitants of any other piece of Earth-based real estate, but the realities of their situation have forced the potential of their lives into the kind of narrow confines that mirror the actual living conditions. Everyone is on very shaky ground -tragedy abounds in a terrifyingly random way, and people respond to this reality in the best and worse ways that humans are capable of.
I really like the idea of an intersection between novel-form storytelling and investigative journalism. There’s certainly a diverse skill set required to do this sort of thing well -especially in the mode that Boo has presented here- but the payoff is great, and the audience is wide. This kind of book appeals to the kind of policy wonks that aren’t going to be picking up a Milan Kundera novel any time soon, and it appeals to the poets and other artistic types who aren’t really reading, say, The Atlantic. While other instances of creative nonfiction have been just as good -I’m thinking specifically about Kerry Howley’s book Thrown, here- few of them have the kind of mass appeal that Behind the Beautiful Forevers does, nor do they relate such important realities.
