Readers of this paper may be forgiven if they forget that Bruce Jackson’s political columns and reporting are not his principal stock in trade. His day job is, as the tag at the end of his stories here sometime indicates, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of more than 20 books as well as a documentary filmmaker and photographer. It is for his work as an academic, and not for his thoroughgoing explorations of the Peace Bridge and casino debates, that he was named Chevalier in L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest honor in the arts and humanities.

Jackson’s latest book, The Story Is True, is the product of his day job: It is about the way we use stories to communicate, to explain ourselves, to excuse ourselves, to find hope, to join ourselves and rationalize things that seem too big for one mind to handle. He examines the way we use word choice, character and shared conceits to construct and understand not just the story but the people listening and telling. He analyzes with remarkable clarity the differences between the way things actually happen in the world and the way they are reconceived and manipulated in a storytelling arena, whether that arena is a work of fiction, a courtroom, a dinner table or the halls of government.

One might be forgiven again, reading this book, if one forgets that Jackson is an academic, for he leads this discourse in the easy, conversational prose of a practiced raconteur, which he most assuredly is. Like a good storyteller, Jackson never allows a page to go by without introducing an element of plot, character or some other storytelling device to engage the reader: a snippet of dialogue, a quick, illustrative anecdote, a reference to a familiar story from literature or the common well of popular culture. Some of the best of these stories come from Jackson or from acquaintances and colleagues, who—again remembering Jackson’s profession—tend to be talented storytellers themselves: Stephen Spender, Pete Seeger, William Kunstler and Jackson’s wife and academic partner, Diane Christian, a Distinguished Teaching Professor in UB’s English Department, among others. All make for entertaining reading, apart from their contribution to the book’s arguments.

My favorite story in the book—more for its form than Jackson’s analysis of it, which is fairly open—is an account of an afternoon on a porch in Huntsville, Texas, drinking beer with historian, minister and prison administrator George Beto. My favorite chapter discusses what is clearly one of Jackson’s favorite books, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans. Here alone does the author indulge in protracted bouts of academic language, though for that he keeps the conversation clear, bright and engaging. Jackson has a reputation as a compelling lecturer at UB, a favorite among students, and his account of Agee and Evans, and the study of storytelling presented in their book, makes it clear why that is.

Elsewhere, Jackson analyzes the stories comprised in the O.J. Simpson trial, in both the media and and the courtroom. He debunks the popular legend about Bob Dylan’s electric band being booed offstage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, then locates the origins of the legend, as well as its purpose. Jackson ends the book with an account of an evening spent with Penelope Creeley, the widow of poet Robert Creeley, a colleague and friend to Jackson and Christian for many years. (Jackson took his title from the last line of a Creeley poem, “Bresson’s Movies,” which is reproduced in the book.) Creeley had passed away the previous year, and the friends passed the evening telling stories about him to one another:

Late last night Pen told about the days she’d spent with Bob’s sister Helen while Helen was dying. Helen was a tough New Englander and she’d had a tough life: she worked hard, a daughter was killed in an auto accident, her husband turned out to have a second family halfway across the country, the man she became involved with after she discovered her husband’s perfidy (who she said was the love of her life) was killed in an auto accident. And now she was in a hospital room in Maine, waiting for the end. “Let’s rewrite your life,” Pen said, “let’s do the story the right way.” Helen brightened and for the next two hours they told one another the other story of Helen’s life. Pen sat there and Helen lay there and jointly they told the Novel of Helen. Shortly after that Helen slipped into a coma, and died.

It’s a perfectly exemplary story, told with a spareness achieved by Jackson’s use of phrases and images that need no elaboration—a dying friend, a lost daughter, a cheating husband, the love of her life, a hospital bed—filtered through a secondary narrator who herself has lost a great love. It illustrates perfectly all the things Jackson has been telling us about stories throughout the book: how we use stories to achieve hope and happiness, to defeat the most difficult aspects of life, to rationalize tragedy; how we use them to connect with one another, how they require both teller and listener, who are almost always in league; how we tap into a shared vocabulary and syntax of plot elements to read one another’s stories for more than simply what happens. It comes to a definitive end that seems to tie together and relate all these elements causally, in a way that life as it is experienced rarely manages.

So moving is this anecdote, and so perfect its placement on the second-to-last page of the book, that one draws back from the text and realizes that Jackson has done just what he says we all must do: He has relinquished his role as arbiter and analyst of what happens in the real world, and resorted to a story to communicate what he wants us to understand about storytelling. The story is, more or less, the last word.