Banality of Fictions, The

Policy Review, Aug/Sep 2003 by Wallace-Wells, Benjamin

The Banality Of Fictions STEPHEN GLASS. The Fabulist. SIMON & SCHUSTER. 339 PAGES. $24.00

BY THE END of The Fabulist, the protagonist - whose name, like the author's, is Stephen Glass - has certainly been through the wringer. Protagonist Glass has been fired from a hip and hot Washington political magazine for making up his stories; he has become a public pinata of the Jayson Blair sort; his friends have retrospectively retracted their friendship and his girlfriend has dumped him; he's stalked by reporters who show up cleverly disguised as pizza deliverymen and bank customers and, worse, by his hectoring, loving Jewish parents; he's achieved a false kind of redemption by working as a shift supervisor at a suburban video store; he's found true redemption in a mah-jongg circle of grandmothers he met at synagogue; he's located true love in a tense, pretty gambling addict and moved to the suburbs. The book's climax comes at a Virginia animal hospital where Glass has come to join his true love, who is there because her dog's penis has swollen to unnatural proportions. The dog is a Lhasa Apso named Milton Rosenbaum. I wish I were making some of this up.

Stylistically, the book is a disaster. Glass the author never achieves either tragedy or comedy; his novel substitutes self-pity for tragedy and slapstick for comedy and then seesaws between them. His characters are so sketchily drawn that you can't even form mental pictures of them; I spent a good bulk of the book laboring under the impression that Glass's girlfriend was Brazilian before discovering, on page 118, that she was actually a Jewish girl from South Orange, New Jersey. And whatever deus Glass happens to be employing, he's certainly at his machina - whenever the author needs an easy way out of a scene, a pager goes off or his protagonist's hour with a shrink is up or his mother calls. It's bad enough that his fringe characters evolve in the cadences of cliche - no one changes or surprises you - and that the reader gets the distinct impression that Glass purloined his players from the Phillip Roth Repertory Company and then flattened them. What's worse is that his protagonist is hopelcssly two-dimensional, too: a cloying, nerdy boy who makes up his stories because he "wanted people to love me more" and finds eventual solace in giving up the fast-paced urbs for a simple suburban life, complete with rabbi. It reads, throughout, like a bad sitcom, humorless, campy, and seen before.

Stephen Glass, the real-life author, lived most of these events himself, or at least the crucial ones. He was a 25-year-old, smart-alecky writer for the New Republic when he was caught making up facts; after he was fired in 1998, the magazine investigated and concluded there were "substantial" fabrications in more than four-fifths of his stories, and Glass became the subject of an intense if short-lived media frenzy. There is some divergence; in the novel, the disgraced Glass went on to work in a video store, while the real-life Glass went to law school. But in general, reviews have taken this novel as Glass's explanation of what, exactly, went wrong. Someone - either the author or the publisher - decided to begin this book with the moment that Glass gets fired, a choice which in one fell swoop eliminates the interesting part of the story - how Stephen Glass came to be "The Fabulist." Instead, we are left with the self-pitying and much less interesting story of what Stephen Glass did to recover from being the fabulist.

It's too bad that Glass butchered his own story so badly that few will read it, because his novel - which purports to give the "why" and the "how" behind his real-life lies - could have told us a lot about contemporary journalism, and, particularly, could have directed us to understand in a way that few commentators have so far the case of Jayson Blair, the young New York Times national reporter caught fabricating countless details in numerous stories in a scandal that would ultimately bring down the paper's top editors, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd. The main narrative that has emerged from the public pontifications about Blair and Glass is that journalism has become too ambitious for its own good: In its quest to be lyrical, analytical, and to have voice, journalism today puts inexperienced reporters on too-important assignments and relegates fact-finding and fact-checking to a low place on its priorities list. The more telling truth may be that journalism, which lets bad cliche pass for lyricism, has not been ambitious enough.

ONE OF THE irritatingly big flaws in The Fabulist is that Glass's world is populated by rather brittle cliches. Loving, hectoring Jewish grandmothers who play mahjongg and set Glass up with their granddaughters. Earnest rabbis. A woman, whom the book sneers at as a totem of white trash middle America, who dresses all in purple, capped by a sweatshirt that says "I Love Purple." What is disturbing about Glass's nonfiction is that his characters were equally thin, equally carapy, no more credible.