Not-so-hot off the presses

What a strange mixture of relief and resentment must have overtaken Stephen Glass upon waking up one morning to learn he’d been supplanted by Jayson Blair of the New York Times as journalism’s most accomplished young liar. The relief part makes sense: No one really wants to claim that title for too long, and Glass had held it uncontested since 1998, when his colorful reportage for the New Republic -- in which he wrote about events that never took place, backed them up with imaginary sources and brought it all to vivid life with beautiful, wholly manufactured details -- was eventually found too good, alas, to be true.

The resentment part is more nuanced but must have had something to do with the uncanny timing of L’Affaire Blair, which just happened to coincide precisely with the publication of Glass’ autobiographical novel, “The Fabulist.” With no warning whatsoever, the media spotlight shifted from this anxiously awaited mea culpa to the breaking news of Blair’s journalistic misdeeds, and suddenly the retelling of Glass’ squalid downfall went from a front-page feature to a jump-page sidebar. What must it feel like, one wonders, to spend years bracing yourself for public excoriation (and possible redemption), only to have nobody show up at your trial?

For someone like Glass -- which is to say, someone for whom attention is oxygen--there’s no greater punishment than marginalization. The need to be discussed and admired by “people who matter” led him to fabricate better, more interesting stories than the wonky policy pieces assigned to him by the New Republic; now, a version of this same impulse has driven him to publish a book, a course of action that some time ago replaced Quiet Disappearance from Public Life as the last refuge of the disgraced. This much, though not much more, is clear from “The Fabulist,” an anemic novel that’s perhaps most notable for not being what Glass’ work for the New Republic most certainly was: pointed, clever and almost addictively entertaining, however untruthful it may have been.

Glass had some talented, if overly trusting, editors at that magazine. He must miss them now more than ever, as he reads his own story back to himself. Where, in these 300-plus pages, is the Pynchonian bravado, the Rabelais- ian wit that marked his earlier short fiction -- like his article about the cult that worshiped George Herbert Walker Bush as a god, or his on-the-scene report of a computer hacker’s top-secret convention and trade show? Maybe it was the frisson of transgression that led Glass to impart these and dozens of other made-up stories with such irresistible vitality; whatever the case, “The Fabulist” suggests that the author’s once-soaring imagination has been grounded by a dutiful compliance with novelistic cliche.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Glass belies whatever journalistic instincts he supposedly had by gravely misapprehending the “big story” here. It is not, as much as it must pain him to admit, how he coped with the pressures of infamy, eluded the ravenously cannibalistic press camped outside his door or reconciled with his disillusioned family members. Put simply, to the extent that readers want to know anything at all about Stephen Glass, they want to know how and why he told all those lies, something he’s obviously uncomfortable discussing. So after the fairly gripping first chapter -- which reads like a 75-page recap of his exposure and summary expulsion from the garden of media -- we’re asked to stick around for the long and not especially compelling story of how he put the pieces back together.

With his career finished and his relationships all gone sour, the author’s eponymously named character returns to the Chicago suburb of his upbringing to bask in the unconditional love of his parents for a spell. When he finally musters the courage to move back to the Washington, D.C., area, he takes an apartment in Virginia and a new job as the day manager of a video store (whose eccentric employees seem borrowed from the record shop in Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity”). In his loneliness, he visits a strip club and a massage parlor. And then, just as he’s resigning himself to a life of pay-for-play human interaction, a neighbor from his apartment building invites him to synagogue, where the secularly minded Stephen reconnects with his Judaism. In short order, he’s rewarded with a divinely understanding new girlfriend.

All of this is relayed in rather unmusical prose that matches the desultory blandness of the character’s life in exile. Sometimes Glass-as-author seems simply to have reached for the wrong word: He describes his trip to the massage parlor, for example, as “one more experiment into the underworld of sex” (did he mean “expedition?” “descent?”); at other times, especially when he’s writing about sex, he seems positively cowed by the task before him. “Songs passed and perhaps an hour later, the Dylan CD came to an end. But still we said nothing, and there was no discomfort in the silence. And then, when it somehow seemed for the first time to be the absolute right moment, I reached over to her and unbuttoned her blouse.... For a while we just held each other quietly, and then we made love.” This from a writer accused of fantastically embellishing the truth and of letting his imagination get the better of him.

Of course, to say that we’re reading “about” the life of Stephen Glass is to confuse nonfiction with fiction. “The Fabulist,” after all, is a novel -- it says so right there on the cover, in morally unconfused black-and-white. But rest assured, Glass is inviting the conflation of his real persona with an imagined one. By retelling the story of his downfall as fiction, he’s free -- there’s really no other way of saying this -- to fudge the truth, to construct a heroic arc for his character that didn’t necessarily materialize for its author in real life. A straight memoir would have required a different kind of public engagement with the blunt fact of his trespasses; he would have had to name names, give dates, explain actions -- in short, document the whole ordeal as a journalist would. For Glass, fiction is less an exalted literary art form than an extraordinarily convenient end run around the bete noire of fact-checking.

Jayson Blair is said to be writing a memoir of his brief career at the New York Times, in which he’ll posit that his tapestry of lies was a defiant, if desperate, response to a perceived culture of institutionalized racism at that newspaper. (It’s an insultingly dubious proposition but perhaps the inevitable one given his pathological irresponsibility.) Glass, we learn from his book jacket, is already hard at work on a second novel. So, let’s get ready to rumble! Shaw vs. Wilde! Faulkner vs. Hemingway! Mailer vs. Vidal! Blair vs. Glass! Every generation of readers deserves its own spectacular literary rivalry. Or actually, in an era when fat book contracts have replaced good old-fashioned ignominy, perhaps it’s more fitting to say that every generation gets the literary rivalry it deserves.