Jonathan Tarleton on the Limits of Research—and Making Peace with What You Don’t Know

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I find particular satisfaction in observing how the works I’m reading weave their way into my words. While writing my book Homes for Living, these texts varied widely. There was, of course, research: books on housing, economics, and political theory whose imprints were often clear, immortalized in a quotation or citation. Less evident were the remnants of the books I chose for escape: science fiction I’d rarely before touched, and which couldn’t be mistaken as “productive” for my project. They made themselves relevant anyway, edging their way in through metaphor, sometimes revealing a societal dynamic in starker, clearer terms than an academic paper I’d turned to for the same answer. Intentionally generative or not, almost all felt necessary, save one misstep. I read Robert Caro.

I did and do love reading Caro’s essays on craft and his biographical tomes on political power. I find his work inspiring. I turned to him with the hope that some of his genius might rub off on me and my much more modest effort than The Power Broker or The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

But reading Caro while working on nonfiction, on something that could be called urban history no less, quickly proved a surefire procurement strategy for a sense of inadequacy. In the glare of his Pulitzer(s)-winning prose, my manuscript looked a dumpster fire, my research Swiss cheese. Being Caro-like was for me—for most—an unachievable standard. He was my perfectionism in writer-form, and I didn’t have the same kind of contractual leeway, nor the support of a spouse doing full-time research, to fulfill his former editor’s famed edict to “turn every page.”

That phrase so encapsulated Caro’s origin story as a dogged investigative reporter and an exhaustive researcher that the charming documentary about his relationship with his editor Robert Gottlieb took it as a title. I, on the contrary, had to fight its internalization. I’d set out to chronicle the community-splitting fights within two large social housing cooperatives in New York, tracing how their residents debated whether to privatize their homes in pursuit of profit or to preserve them as public goods for future generations.

I came to the project with the baggage of perfectionism, a variety of methods, and a muddle of training that made me certain the perspective of any of the thousands of resident-owners involved could be revelatory. I’d been introduced to the fights as a journalist, studied them as a graduate student in urban planning, and conducted interviews informed by past forays into oral history—but I didn’t have the wherewithal, nor the capital, to turn every page, to interview every cooperator.

As I dipped in and out of the research over the course of a decade, I had to learn to turn only some. A subset of the buildings’ residents would have to stand in for a greater part of the whole, just as I hoped the particular of these stories would shine a light on the general of our societal moment.

Occasionally I also had to find peace with skipping a page I knew might be rich. There was the man who served on the co-op board, tipping it toward privatization, who I tracked down at the local coffee shop he visited daily. Given the chance to approach him, I asked if he was “so-and-so.” Unfortunately, “so-and-so” was a different resident whose name I’d just read among my notes. He gruffly answered “No,” and having botched my initial introduction, I didn’t catch him at the coffee shop again.

I had to weather my personal disdain anew when, in my attempts at turning, I tore the page instead. I’d set up an interview with someone I respected as a radio journalist who also happened to live in one of the buildings. He bluntly opened with his opinion that my recording set-up was amateurish. I tried to keep my nodding to a minimum as he shared keen observations on neighborly dynamics. When he left, I checked the proverbial tape. I’d captured only 15 minutes of an hour-long dialogue, pages lost to one recorder out of space and my back-up out of battery. Amateur indeed.

In the shadow of Caro, these moments could feel like a kind of professional malpractice. I had to balance them with the moments of research bliss: ruffling through filing cabinets in an architect’s basement to thumb early floor plans for those co-ops, their edges charred from an office’s destruction on 9/11 and handpicked from the ashes by the old man upstairs. Those were the kind of pages in which I found joy if not immediate use. They don’t appear in my book, and I don’t expect more volumes to come in which to file them.

I didn’t turn all, but I turned many. In the past few years, three key interviewees from my project have passed away. They don’t “live on” in Homes for Living, but their ideas on what neighbors owe one another and the wider city do, along with hints of their personality: James Szal’s banter with his shih tzu Gucci, Eva Sacks’s love for plena, Leo Aria’s preference for a sugar-heavy decaf espresso.

The resulting book is, it goes without saying, imperfect. I couldn’t coax perfection across from Caro’s work to mine because it doesn’t exist there either. But he too rubbed off. I dug into why a vast loophole resulting in the loss of a public good was introduced into legislation governing these co-ops decades back without any clear benefit. As I worked my way through committee reports from the New York State legislature, through bill jackets and press releases, I tried to assume nothing until the intent became clear. The loophole that had set these community splitting debates in motion, and the crisis for affordability that followed, was never part of the plan. An egregious oversight, of drafting and of implementation, had prompted the schisms and losses of today.

My own oversights mark my process, my project. That some would was inevitable. Rigor doesn’t equal perfection, so turn every page—or don’t. Get used to missing something.

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Homes for Living by Jonathan Tarleton is available via Beacon Press.