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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Rechecking Steve's work, painstaking though it was, proved to be the easy part of picking up the pieces. Much harder was the soul-searching Steve's betrayal prompted. How had he played me so exquisitely, duped me so utterly? I imagined the contempt Steve must have felt as I praised him for scoops he knew were transparently fake. How could he not lose respect for someone so easily fooled? And fooled because Steve saw what was shallow and weak in me -- my editorial vanity; my silly anger at the New Republic; my salacious desire to get something on Vernon Jordan.
I had to work to acknowledge the depths of my responsibility for publishing lies. It was painful, but I hope I'm a better journalist and a better person for it. Steve Glass, however, found his way to that dark spot in my soul with unnerving facility. He discovered it and then he exploited it. Just as he did with other editors -- and thousands of readers -- when portraying a black thug robbing a cabbie, or a black woman falling prey to a pseudo-psychic, or a denizen of red state America insipid enough to belong to the Church of George Herbert Walker Bush.
And this is really the main reason why those of us who worked with Steve find it so hard to forgive him. Instead of using his gifts to try to make the world a better place, Steve mined the crudest raw material of our fallible human natures. And then he put it all on paper, where it could inflict tangible, long-lasting harm on people who hadn't done anything wrong, and ran away.
You see why forgiving Steve Glass doesn't come easy.
So it was with both optimism and trepidation that I turned to "The Fabulist." Some who knew Glass are outraged that Simon & Schuster has published the book, as if Glass shouldn't even get the opportunity to plead his case. Having once myself come under fire for publishing a book about my days at George, I sympathized with Steve in this regard. In his case, I thought, If we believe in redemption, don't we have to permit its means? Glass had every right to publish this book, and Simon & Schuster did nothing wrong in publishing it. The question I wanted to know is, Had Glass used his opportunity wisely?
"The Fabulist" is surely one of the strangest books I've ever read. It comes wrapped in minimalist packaging: a simple white cover with black type that reads, "The Fabulist -- A Novel -- Stephen Glass." It seems to suggest that the book is the plain, unvarnished, no-bullshit story, and the only baggage it carries is that which the reader brings to it. It also lacks an author photo, another cryptic touch. Whoever heard of a first novel without a picture of the writer? A Simon & Schuster spokeswoman told me that the omission was "a style choice. We wanted to let the book speak for itself." Maybe. But to those of us who know Steve, this all feels painfully familiar, as if "The Fabulist" is not merely a book, but a stratagem. Like Steve himself -- or, I should say, like Steve when I knew him -- it is coy, flirtatious, manipulative even as it pretends to candor. The whiteness is a blank canvas upon which to project our own biases, just as Steve was.
Inside, things only get stranger. "The Fabulist" begins with a prefatory note from Glass: "I was fired in 1998 from my job as a writer at The New Republic -- for having fabricated dozens of magazine articles. I deeply regret my misconduct, and the pain it caused." But while the following novel is "inspired by certain events in my life," it should not be confused with nonfiction. Like the cover says, it's a novel.
But it sure reads like real life. "The Fabulist" tells the story of an up-and-coming young journalist named, yes, Stephen Glass. Our antihero works at the Washington Weekly, a doppelgänger New Republic, described as a political magazine whose specialty is the hatchet job. "They used the source's own words to hang him," Glass writes. (They?) "It was assisted suicide, not murder." But it is Glass who is hanged by his own words when he is discovered to have published fiction posing as nonfiction (this in a work of nonfiction posing as fiction). He is promptly fired by his boss, Robert Underwood, an obvious stand-in for Chuck Lane. Soon after, Glass' girlfriend dumps him. Chased by bloodthirsty media vultures, he flies home to his parents, who love him regardless and fear that he is going to commit suicide.
Up to this point, the story, as far as I know, nearly exactly parallels reality -- which raises the obvious question why Glass didn't simply write a memoir. Did he think that a novel would sell better? That no one would ever again believe his nonfiction? Or are there things in "The Fabulist" for which he does not want to take responsibility?
Eventually, Glass returns to "Jeffersonville," Va. -- Arlington, one presumes. In search of love, he tries to date a stripper and visits a rub-and-tug massage parlor with his brother. This Glass may be spineless, but he's impressively virile in the sack. His real embrace, however, lies elsewhere. Glass takes a job in a video store -- see how far he has fallen! -- receives spiritual instruction from a rabbi who forgives without asking questions, and meets a girl who loves him without asking questions. But in time, Glass realizes that Washington will never forgive him. And so he heads up 1-95 to New York -- and a new fictional life.
