What his argument misses, or ignores, is the fact that much of what makes a piece of writing feel “consequential” as art has to do with how it meets its readers’ expectations. D’Agata wants us to judge a piece of writing based on only its artistic merits, but in the case of nonfiction, those merits have a relationship to the world. Fictional authority is a matter of suspension of disbelief: novels must convince us that the feelings of fake people matter. But nonfiction is innocent until proved guilty. We begin with that natural sympathy we have for something we might well have experienced ourselves, so our guard is down. Nonfiction’s authority thus derives from the simultaneously rigorous (they did the legwork) and artful (they selected the right details) arrangement of impressions into a narrative that makes surprising sense.

So if the signal experience of fiction is caring about nonpeople, and that of “straight” nonfiction is one of the revelatory arrangement of verifiable details, what experience is D’Agata — with his winky manipulations — offering us? Sometimes he suggests that what he practices is the art of the “lyric essay,” a term he popularized among nonfiction M.F.A. students, which places his work in a tradition extending from Seneca and Cicero through Montaigne, all of whom got along fine without fact-checkers. Other times, he writes that he has taken up this cause because “nonfiction has been struggling to distinguish itself as art for decades in our culture,” but to the fans of sophisticated literary journalism, this is absurd. Finally he makes a condescending argument about how salutary it would be for readers to work harder to figure out for themselves what’s true and what’s invented.

This last argument suggests that we need a hybrid form, because it helps wean us from the naïve belief that just because something is labeled “nonfiction,” it represents the world as it is. But the fantasy of nonfiction isn’t just one of representational truth — it’s also one of reproducibility. We want to believe that given the same opportunities, we might have come up with the same interpretation of events. It’s appealing to think that the shared, discoverable details of the world are enough, a comfort to believe that having an experience is the same thing as being able to narrate it. This, I think, is why Frey’s readers felt so betrayed: had those events in that order happened to us, we might’ve written our own books.

A good example is a recent New Yorker article by Alec Wilkinson about the most successful Guinness record-holders. You have to do a lot of work to make a reader care that a fictional character has eaten nine fictitious tons of metal. You have to do practically no work at all to make a reader care about a man who calls himself Monsieur Mangetout, who attestably did. You just need reliable people to vouch for it. Fingal, in checking D’Agata, went to vouch for it himself: he used his own vacation to Vegas to fanatically retrace D’Agata’s steps. Acting on behalf of all the invisible foot soldiers of institutional accountability, he tried to literalize the fantasy that experience can be reproduced.

What’s ultimately so weird, though, is how superfluous D’Agata’s embroidery seems. The factual stakes are almost hysterically low: most of the “discrepancies” are trivial and were reconciled for publication in The Believer. D’Agata, for example, describes the series of retail outlets that Levi Presley would have walked by en route to the observation-deck elevator. Fingal retraces the possible steps, finding that D’Agata has cherry-picked the most lurid-sounding names from all possible Stratospheric paths. These conflicts could have been avoided by early diplomacy. But D’Agata’s histrionics ensured silly rigor.

It’s clear enough why he wanted this codex published: the original essay is excellent, much better than The Believer’s version. But that’s neither the facts’ fault nor the genre’s; it’s John D’Agata’s. And it still doesn’t explain why he was such a fight-spoiling dodobrain from the beginning. I, like presumably many people, am naturally sympathetic to a soft version of his arguments. There are modes of writing that get along fine in a pale gray. We all know raconteurs whose embellishments and bluffs don’t rankle. But this understanding develops over time; nobody’s entitled to it. And we’re much quicker to grant humorists latitude than ruminators on teen suicide.

The ultimate problem then is that D’Agata doesn’t actually want new institutions. His hybrids have gotten along fine in The Gettysburg Review. The fact that his liberties have made it hard for him to publish for a wide audience is an institutional cost he has chosen to bear. If he doesn’t want to deal with Fingals, he might try to publish his stuff as fiction, which clearly meets his definition for art. But just trying to sneak and bully his work into magazines is a disingenuous strategy; it borrows the prestige of a credibility he forsakes. It’s as if he wants to invent his metal and eat it too.