Anatomy of a Journalistic Fraud: Stephen Glass's The Fabulist

In the late nineties, twenty-five year old Stephen Glass was a famed wordsmith on a rising star. As an associate editor for The New Republic, he wrote heaps of humorous articles concerning the most zany of circumstances. Whether it involved Republicans getting loaded at the '97 CPAC conference or the emergence of Monica Lewinsky condoms at a novelty convention, his stories effectively enchanted readers and grabbed the attention of editors at reputable publications such as Harper's, Rolling Stone and the now-defunct George. As the youngest staff writer at TNR, he was not only among the most successful, but perhaps the most popular among his co-workers and friends in the industry.

However, in the midst of his popularity, Glass's untimely death as a journalist came to fruition in May of 1998. It followed the publication of "Hack Heaven," a colorful piece that covered an outlandish deal struck between a teenage hacker and a big time software company. Forbes.com reporter Adam Penenberg attempted to verify the existence of the specific people, locations and events cited in the Glass article, but to no avail. With Penenberg's research brought to his attention, Chuck Lane, then lead editor of The New Republic, pursued the matter until a very difficult conclusion had been reached: the piece was wholly fabricated. Glass had forged journalistic notes, created fake voicemails and e-mail accounts, invented places and people, and deceived his editors and readers - all in pursuit of a florid, seemingly legitimate story. Glass was quickly fired, and within days of his exposure, it was found that twenty-seven of the forty-one pieces he had written for The New Republic were either partially or entirely fabricated. The disgraced writer has since followed in the footsteps of Janet Cooke in becoming a face for notoriety in journalism.

Glass remained reclusive until 2003, when he resurfaced with his first novel entitled The Fabulist, an unabashedly semi-autobiographical account of his fall from grace and its afterward. He spins his tale very much in the way Sylvia Plath chronicles her first breakdown and suicide attempt in The Bell Jar: fact and fiction are interwoven substantially, so it's difficult to distinguish either in the majority of the novel. This is unsurprising given the person in question; however, since most readers are hardly naive in light of this man's identity, his history makes it easier to pair up many of the book's characters and elements with their real life counterparts. Among the most obvious are Chuck Lane disguised as short-fused editor Robert, and Ted Davidson masquerading as canonized former editor Michael Kelly, who served as Lane's predecessor and regretfully contributed to Glass's rise. The Washington Weekly stands in for The New Republic, The Substance Monthly for The Atlantic Monthly, et al.

In all his fantastic invention, you'd think that a man who cooked up stories about Monicondoms and Vernon Jordan's alleged fascination with jailbait would come up with fuller disguises for his demons as opposed to the emphatically thin veneers that are presented. But the fact that Glass objected to obscuring these details completely makes the novel's intention all the more ambiguous. Is it really, truly an apology to the world, or does it merely serve as an unreliable account from the perpetrator? A means of venting? A career move?

All of the above.

As the character of Stephen Aaron Glass narrates the first half of The Fabulist, there seldom rises an occasion where he speaks to the reader directly. Immediately, inside the first few pages, he offers a reflection on his wrongdoings, and even goes far enough to say that his former friends and colleagues will likely remain suspicious of this feat. Since this is within the confines of fiction versus that of a confessional memoir, the blinders are turned on, but tenuously so. Proceeding that, the reader is not again directly confronted by Glass until the fourth part of the book. Appropriately titled "Dossier," this short chapter begins rather strikingly: "This is where I'm going to lose you." Subsequently, his thoughts during the fabrication process are recorded pitifully, the reflections wholly apologetic. The process of verification (fact-checking) is described in an feeble attempt to answer the question of how he got away with it. Once we enter "Desperation," the fifth portion, the novel resumes its tonal normality and continues as such up to the book's conclusion.

It's gathered that Glass carries a heavy, faulty assumption: the reader is siding with him. The multitudes of people who purchased this book did not buy it because they have a spot in their hearts for him; they merely wanted to see what the world's biggest liar had to say about his highly publicized downfall, especially since Glass never outwardly confessed to his wrongdoings. He appeared on CBS's 60 Minutes in the wake of The Fabulist's release and offered what seemed like a public apology. As the writer wallowed in sensitivity and sadness before the camera, even long-time anchor Steve Kroft looked unconvinced, making it apparent that if there are individuals out there who believe Glass is truly sorry, they are few in number.

Despite his lies and his living completely in fantasy, Stephen Glass is an excellent author. Dare I go out on a limb and say that I admire him as a writer? His prose is fluid and animated, his diction well chosen and the novel well organized. It's no surprise as to why he was revered before he was caught. Sadly, the context of both the novel and its writer overshadow The Fabulist's good qualities, and leaves readers with utter, unsettling ambiguity. The Stephen Glass character admits that he knows the degree of his fucking up, and he does apologize - not to the reader, but as a character to other characters. Does that mean he's truly sorry, or is his fictional apology just that: fiction?

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Note: For those interested - all of Glass's articles, with the exception of "Hack Heaven" and maybe a few of his contributions to other publications, have disappeared entirely. TNR has purged his pieces from their site, and, likely due to copyright, no one has posted them. Even some of the more famous articles I mentioned in this review ("Monica Sells," "Spring Breakdown") only remain in the pages of TNR's back issues.