Paul Maliszewski begins Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters,
and Other Great Pretenders, his collection of essays on frauds and cons
(i.e., Stephen Glass and James Frey), with a long, defensive
confessional chapter in which he outlines, in exacting detail, the
various fake editorials and articles that he passed off on the Business
Journal of Central New York, a publication which, in Maliszewski’s
reckoning, had neither editorial merit nor a staff with an ability to
discern fact from increasingly clumsy and frantic fiction. Maliszewski
wrote for the Business Journal for a while and found his routine duties
so numbing and the politics of the staff so repulsive that he amused
himself by inventing a cast of shrill and bitter conservatives who
applauded the Journal’s conservative, pro-business slant so
enthusiastically and with such hyperbolic clarity of vision that they
made it seem ridiculous; this chapter provides Maliszewski’s bona fides
as a faker and gives him a chance to suggest obliquely that he was
doing much the same thing as Jonathan Swift did in "A Modest Proposal"
when he submitted overwritten, cutesy adaptations of CIA torture
manuals thinly dressed up as management philosophy.
By the end of the boring first chapter, I was prepared to scorn
Maliszewski’s slim, beautifully designed book for fraud. Maliszewski
writes elegantly, with verve and economy and a sure sense of language,
but his introduction suffers from a lack of vision and a preponderance
of navel-gazing. The rest of the book felicitously reverses this false
start, abandoning the author’s own frankly uninteresting frauds and
moving on to some very interesting and serious consideration of the
recent history of large-scale fraud in the United States. He focuses on
a series of interconnected questions. Why do people perpetrate frauds?
More importantly, why do people buy them, and what do they say about
the supposedly non-fraudulent products with which they share the
attention of American consumers?
“We many, we voyeuristic many, we want the real, and indeed we hunger
for it, but we also want our real stuff to come in readily consumable
packages,” he writes in his second essay, a rambling piece that begins
with some detective work on an email hoax involving a homicidal bear in
Alaska. Maliszewski early on shelves the question of why people
fake—Stephen Glass, James Frey, and JT Leroy (a.k.a Laura Albert) wrote
their fictions basically for mercenary reasons, to make money and to
build their reputations. Maliszewski muses that writing under a
pseudonym can be an “oddly, and surprisingly, liberating,” exercise in
trying on a new identity, but he basically lets us rest on the
assumption that the literary and journalistic fakers on which he bases
the first few essays perpetrated their frauds for reasons that are at
best uninteresting and at worst unfathomable. What is more interesting
is: Why did people snap up these frauds with such joy?
Through myriad examples Maliszewski shows that most fakers tell their
readers exactly what they want to hear. Leroy’s fictional memoirs of
growing up as a drug addicted boy-prostitute provided an irresistible
mixture of treacly sentimentality, taboo sex, depredation, and
redemption that Maliszewski traces to the self-help literature of the
late 1960s. Leroy provides a tidy, forgettable narrative which lets the
reader glimpse into a gross and forbidden world, find it exactly as he
would have expected, and then move on. In a long savaging of Glass,
Maliszewski shows that Glass’ celebrated, false articles gave a frantic
burlesque of the values that his editors obviously held:
Glass’s talent lay less in the originality of his imagination than in
his solicitous ability to seize on whatever the conventionally wise
were chatting about at cocktail parties and repackage it in bright new
containers, selling the palaver right back to them.
Maliszewski asks if an article on the fact that people in the finance
industry treat Alan Greenspan as a living god would have ever made it
past the editorial desk—it wouldn’t. But Glass’ article on a financial
analyst who literally worshipped an image of Greenspan made it into
print; the same goes for Glass’ invention of a pimply-faced hacker, a
bald use of a stock cliché that Slate’s Jack Shafer praises,
inexplicably, for its imaginative power. Maliszewski lets neither Glass
nor Shafer get away with this tepid and dull pandering; this chapter
(“A Story Born Every Minute”) is dazzling, brief and insightful.
Maliszewski brings up the fact that art critics actually study
forgeries, they keep them around and even arrange shows of them so that
they can better understand how to protect themselves from future con
men. He also shows how art historians can detect forgeries by looking
for traces of anachronistic popular tastes in them—the forgeries most
often conform to the obvious standards of the time they are made,
rather than the putative time of the works which they imitate. He
mentions, for instance, the story of a fake Matisse sketch that, while
good enough to be purchased by the Fogg Museum, bore a striking
resemblance to 1950s era department store ads.
Fakers questions why the extraordinary public reaction to Glass, and
Jayson Blair, and other journalistic imposters didn’t go as far as the
art world’s reincorporation of fraudulent pieces. Journalistic
commentators expressed indignation and horror but ultimately they
classed Blair and Glass as non-journalists, people who were
fundamentally different from the rest of the newspaper and magazine set
and who through their singular barbarity and willingness to lie made
the rest of the journalistic establishment’s reliance on truth all the
more noble. The fundamental assumptions of journalism remained beyond
question.
Maliszewski’s insight is that journalism, and the memoir, confine their
stories to a few acceptable forms, and as long as one is canny and
shrewd enough to discern these forms one can pass off the most
egregious fantasy as legitimate. The fakers, though they may have done
harm, revealed a fundamental lack of imagination in the ostensibly
creative fields in which they played. After its first chapter Fakers provokes real thought and tells some entertaining stories suitable for
cocktail-party repetition. Maliszewski writes with grace, intelligence
and playfulness; the book is thoroughly worthwhile.
Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders by Paul Maliszewski. Published by New Press, 256 pp., $24.95.
