The journalist and the murderer

On one hand, the situation Finkel found himself in was so unexpected and so dramatic that it's hard to know, in the abstract, what you or I or anyone else would have done differently. In my own career as a journalist, I've been lied to with great sincerity (I think) by a man who was guilty of attempted murder (I think). It's a disorienting experience. We all want to believe that other people are telling us the truth, and reporters want to believe it most of all. And the question Finkel asked himself was real: Had his capacity for honesty, as a human being and a writer, been eaten away by his deception?

That said, there are a dozen points in "True Story," or a hundred, when I wanted to reach into the book and slap Michael Finkel. What I wanted to say to him was this: Chris Longo apparently tied rocks wrapped in pillowcases to the ankles of his sleeping son and daughter, and then threw them into a muddy pond in rural Oregon, where they spent the last seconds of their lives terrified, trapped, freezing, drowning. (They were recovered wearing only underwear, with no signs of trauma, looking almost as if they were still asleep.) I can imagine facing the bitter fact that even this man is a human being, and that no one could do something so horrible to people he supposedly loved without suffering some kind of grievous pain. But you, buddy -- you became his best friend. You sat by the phone with a pot of tea every Wednesday night, waiting for him to call. Were you completely out of your fucking mind?

Finkel and Longo repeatedly vowed to be totally honest with each other, and after a bit of cat-and-mouse, they struck a deal: Longo would communicate with no other journalists, and Finkel would reveal nothing about their letters and phone calls to anyone until Longo's trial was over. As with his first-date quip, Finkel seems partly aware that their relationship had a highly charged, almost romantic intensity. I don't mean to suggest that there was a homosexual attraction between them; they only met a few times, and then only through the glass walls of a prison visiting room. In fact, what I mean is that the danger of homosexuality was removed from the relationship -- since Longo was almost certainly never going to see the outside again -- which set them free to pursue a level of intimacy almost unknown between two heterosexual men.

Furthermore, their narcissistic attraction to each other had a curious, borderline-erotic quality. Longo literally wanted to be Finkel, and seemed to think that with the right education and the right breaks, he could have been. In one letter Finkel quotes, Longo remembered his Mexican charade wistfully, as a period spent "half daydreaming of what the real life of Michael Finkel must be like. I've learned enough in life to realize that no life or career is as fantastic as you might imagine, but I couldn't help picturing how my life would have been if I had taken whatever steps the real Mr. Finkel took to attain the position that he now held."(In his letters to the murder-groupies who wrote him mash notes, Longo would sometimes steal phrases or sentences from Finkel's writing, and pass them off as his own sentiments.)

For his part, Finkel almost seems to wish he could be the version of him that people in Canczn had enjoyed so much. Longo is the well-built, all-American, people-pleasin' type, and apparently quite a chick magnet. His Mexico sojourn involved several late-night naked swims with Norwegian and Swedish women he met at parties (although he says he resisted all sexual overtures before meeting the German photographer). "I can state with certainty, and some sadness," the real Mr. Finkel writes, "that any time someone answering to the name Michael Finkel has been skinny-dipping with Scandinavians, I was nowhere around."

At one point in "True Story," Finkel and Longo talk frankly about the fact that their relationship is based on self-interest. Finkel is using Longo to write a story that will resurrect his career, and Longo is using Finkel -- as the latter realizes rather late in the game -- to help him craft a defense to the seemingly insurmountable case against him. It's an invigorating, almost frightening moment, but it doesn't tell the whole story. No one had been better than Longo, Finkel tells him, "at exposing and analyzing my moral flaws." The accused murderer responds: "I'm keeping the connection with you. It's not just a connection on the surface. I think it's deeper than that."

Longo sometimes seems like the more perceptive of these two, frankly. He's right, there is a fundamental connection between them: Neither of these guys is capable of seeing beyond their own egos. Other critics have observed that there's a conceptual link between the invented child in Finkel's Africa story and his apparent lack of empathy or compassion for the children Longo murdered. Finkel expresses genuine contrition for his faked article; he understands that he violated the norms of journalism and irreparably damaged his career. But he seems unable to grasp why others would be horrified at his boy-crush fascination with a man who killed small children in cold blood.

It seems clear that Finkel and Longo's friendship was real, that both men saw it as simultaneously instrumental and therapeutic. Both believed, I suspect, that total honesty with a fellow narcissist -- one likely to spot lies and evasions -- might heal their respective pathologies. But both were liars, one writ large and the other writ small. One was a murderer and the other was a journalist, and in the end they couldn't escape those roles.

Next Page: The slippery relationship between journalist and reporter

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