The Fabulist
I don't remember exactly when I started maniacally devouring news stories about disgraced former journalist Stephen Glass, but I'm pretty sure it must have been in the summer of 2000. I got my hands on a copy of the Vanity Fair article that would later serve as the basis for the film "Shattered Glass," I read everything I could find about him on the Internet, I zipped through what I could find of his fabricated articles. And when I first heard that he was writing a novelization of his own experiences, I had a very different reaction from that of the people he'd betrayed. They were all livid because they saw the book as an attempt to cash in on public interest in his story, but me, I was relieved. You see, it fit in very tidily with how I wanted to view Glass: as a natural storyteller who had slotted himself into the wrong niche. I kept thinking that maybe if he'd fallen into legitimate fiction writing just a little bit sooner, he would have found that he got the same sort of high from sliding fiction into reality consensually that he got from doing it non-consensually. Maybe then no one would have gotten hurt.
Considering how closely I've followed reports on his rise and fall, it's notable that I didn't buy Glass's book when it came out last year. I told myself it was because I didn't want to reward him by giving him my money, and that someday I'd pick up a copy at a used bookstore. But if I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that a lot of it was also because the reviews had been so universally scathing. Now, many of those reviews came from the pens of journalists who were clearly offended by Glass's actions, so I took any assertions of the book's mediocrity with a grain of salt. But what if it really did turn out to be that bad? What would that mean? For a long time, I thought I was just better off remaining blissfully ignorant.
Today, though, where tangleofthorns and I are writing a novel in which one of the characters is a journalist who slowly descends into fabrication, I decided it was finally time. I bought a copy of The Fabulist through abebooks, thereby neatly dodging the issue of whether Glass would make money from my purchase. The book, clad in a white cover with simple black ink letters, bears the ascription A NOVEL as if to remind the reader that this story about a young journalist at a Washington political magazine who fabricates stories is not the story of the *real* young journalist at a Washington political magazine who fabricated stories. For someone who already knows all the ins and outs of Glass's exploits, the story is a strange mixture of fiction and fact in which it's difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. I understand the appeal of this sort of writing all too well -- setting stories in real places, involving real events and recognizable names so that readers may imagine that these things could actually have happened -- it all adds to the illusion, and thus to the writer's own excitement. Glass's bits of realism in this novel are probably a bit more extreme than most: the protagonist bears the same name as his notorious creator, and the details are a bit *too* close to what actually happened for comfort. But no matter, he's disclaimed this story as a novel in big black letters on the front cover, and given his background, this is the sort of thing Glass should do best, right? It should be a terrific yarn.
Sadly, it's just not. Now, many of Glass's former friends and colleagues have taken sadistic glee in reporting that the man actually doesn't write all that well, and that when he was a journalist, he needed drafts upon drafts to get through even the simplest of stories. So let me clear one thing up: Glass certainly can string words together into pretty sentences. But the narrative falls completely flat, and what makes that fact all the more tragic is the fact that The Fabulist really *could* have been a good story. Unbound by the constraints of the truth, Glass could have written a beautifully embroidered version of how exciting it felt to fabricate stories, his desperation in wanting to be adored, and his close encounters with people who could have caught him sooner, building to a crescendo in a classic narrative arc which would end, as the film about him does, with his downfall. Instead, he chose to begin the novel with the ending of that story, and in doing so, he seems to have bypassed everything interesting he had to say. The result is painfully fragmented prose that dwells interminably on the dull and skirts over anything that seems potentially exciting. Instead of experiencing the devastation of Glass-The-Character's own self-destruction along with him, the reader is subjected to watching him hide in his parents' home, take a job at a video store, and avoid encountering anyone who had anything to do with his previous life.
Okay, so Glass doesn't really grasp the art of narrative. It's his first attempt at writing fiction -- at least where he's admitting it upfront -- so let's cut him a break in that department. But surely the guy who once brought us colourful computer hacker Ian Restil and Susan the phone psychic had at least managed to come up with compelling characters for us to enjoy, right? Alas, no luck there, either. Peppered throughout the tedium of what amounts to a terribly uninspired life, Glass-The-Character has endless unselfconscious encounters with secondary characters the reader can't bring himself to give one whit about. In every case they're more caricatures than they are people: his girlfriend is a self-centred bitch who doesn't really understand him, his relatives cardboard cutouts of Jewish stereotypes, his co-workers at the video store thrown in for comic relief. None of them are likeable, none of them are interesting, none of them are even remotely real. And even the protagonist -- who you'd think Glass would have some pretty keen insights into after so many years of therapy -- is neither hero nor anti-hero, but a personalityless teller of a story that seemingly has little to do with him, his feelings, or his motivations. Like the narrator in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," Glass-The-Character simply details the events of the story with a detachment that borders on pathological given that these events supposedly actually happened to him.
In the end I have to admit that everything I wanted to believe about Glass seems to have been wrong. The Fabulist doesn't read like the work of a gifted storyteller who ended up in the wrong profession, got caught up in trying to do what he does best in an inappropriate environment, and in his confusion and desperation, quasi-innocently hurt a bunch of people. It reads like the work of a gifted con artist whose talents dry up when he's not caught up in the improvisation of the moment. To tell a truly great story, you need to do more than make things up on the fly; you also need to construct a cohesive narrative and flawed-yet-lovable people for the events of that narrative to happen to. You need to reflect on what those events imply for the human beings you've invented, and make your readers feel what those human beings are feeling as the story unfolds. Glass, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have enough insight into the human condition to take those necessary extra steps (especially, maybe, when he's writing about someone so similar to himself). He's not, as it turns out, the world's most misunderstood fiction writer. He's just, as one of his former co-workers at the New Republic called him in his infamous 60 Minutes interview, "a worm."
After everything he's done, being a bad storyteller turns out to be the one thing I can't forgive him for.
Considering how closely I've followed reports on his rise and fall, it's notable that I didn't buy Glass's book when it came out last year. I told myself it was because I didn't want to reward him by giving him my money, and that someday I'd pick up a copy at a used bookstore. But if I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that a lot of it was also because the reviews had been so universally scathing. Now, many of those reviews came from the pens of journalists who were clearly offended by Glass's actions, so I took any assertions of the book's mediocrity with a grain of salt. But what if it really did turn out to be that bad? What would that mean? For a long time, I thought I was just better off remaining blissfully ignorant.
Today, though, where tangleofthorns and I are writing a novel in which one of the characters is a journalist who slowly descends into fabrication, I decided it was finally time. I bought a copy of The Fabulist through abebooks, thereby neatly dodging the issue of whether Glass would make money from my purchase. The book, clad in a white cover with simple black ink letters, bears the ascription A NOVEL as if to remind the reader that this story about a young journalist at a Washington political magazine who fabricates stories is not the story of the *real* young journalist at a Washington political magazine who fabricated stories. For someone who already knows all the ins and outs of Glass's exploits, the story is a strange mixture of fiction and fact in which it's difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. I understand the appeal of this sort of writing all too well -- setting stories in real places, involving real events and recognizable names so that readers may imagine that these things could actually have happened -- it all adds to the illusion, and thus to the writer's own excitement. Glass's bits of realism in this novel are probably a bit more extreme than most: the protagonist bears the same name as his notorious creator, and the details are a bit *too* close to what actually happened for comfort. But no matter, he's disclaimed this story as a novel in big black letters on the front cover, and given his background, this is the sort of thing Glass should do best, right? It should be a terrific yarn.
Sadly, it's just not. Now, many of Glass's former friends and colleagues have taken sadistic glee in reporting that the man actually doesn't write all that well, and that when he was a journalist, he needed drafts upon drafts to get through even the simplest of stories. So let me clear one thing up: Glass certainly can string words together into pretty sentences. But the narrative falls completely flat, and what makes that fact all the more tragic is the fact that The Fabulist really *could* have been a good story. Unbound by the constraints of the truth, Glass could have written a beautifully embroidered version of how exciting it felt to fabricate stories, his desperation in wanting to be adored, and his close encounters with people who could have caught him sooner, building to a crescendo in a classic narrative arc which would end, as the film about him does, with his downfall. Instead, he chose to begin the novel with the ending of that story, and in doing so, he seems to have bypassed everything interesting he had to say. The result is painfully fragmented prose that dwells interminably on the dull and skirts over anything that seems potentially exciting. Instead of experiencing the devastation of Glass-The-Character's own self-destruction along with him, the reader is subjected to watching him hide in his parents' home, take a job at a video store, and avoid encountering anyone who had anything to do with his previous life.
Okay, so Glass doesn't really grasp the art of narrative. It's his first attempt at writing fiction -- at least where he's admitting it upfront -- so let's cut him a break in that department. But surely the guy who once brought us colourful computer hacker Ian Restil and Susan the phone psychic had at least managed to come up with compelling characters for us to enjoy, right? Alas, no luck there, either. Peppered throughout the tedium of what amounts to a terribly uninspired life, Glass-The-Character has endless unselfconscious encounters with secondary characters the reader can't bring himself to give one whit about. In every case they're more caricatures than they are people: his girlfriend is a self-centred bitch who doesn't really understand him, his relatives cardboard cutouts of Jewish stereotypes, his co-workers at the video store thrown in for comic relief. None of them are likeable, none of them are interesting, none of them are even remotely real. And even the protagonist -- who you'd think Glass would have some pretty keen insights into after so many years of therapy -- is neither hero nor anti-hero, but a personalityless teller of a story that seemingly has little to do with him, his feelings, or his motivations. Like the narrator in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," Glass-The-Character simply details the events of the story with a detachment that borders on pathological given that these events supposedly actually happened to him.
In the end I have to admit that everything I wanted to believe about Glass seems to have been wrong. The Fabulist doesn't read like the work of a gifted storyteller who ended up in the wrong profession, got caught up in trying to do what he does best in an inappropriate environment, and in his confusion and desperation, quasi-innocently hurt a bunch of people. It reads like the work of a gifted con artist whose talents dry up when he's not caught up in the improvisation of the moment. To tell a truly great story, you need to do more than make things up on the fly; you also need to construct a cohesive narrative and flawed-yet-lovable people for the events of that narrative to happen to. You need to reflect on what those events imply for the human beings you've invented, and make your readers feel what those human beings are feeling as the story unfolds. Glass, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have enough insight into the human condition to take those necessary extra steps (especially, maybe, when he's writing about someone so similar to himself). He's not, as it turns out, the world's most misunderstood fiction writer. He's just, as one of his former co-workers at the New Republic called him in his infamous 60 Minutes interview, "a worm."
After everything he's done, being a bad storyteller turns out to be the one thing I can't forgive him for.