The Unimaginative Imaginatist

A review of The Fabulist, a novel by Stephen Glass.

by Andrew Hearst • The New York Sun • May 20, 2003

In the summer of 1997, I attended a party in Washington thrown by a guy with close connections to the staff of The New Republic. One of the guests was Stephen Glass, a young TNR reporter who was then becoming one of the city’s most talked-about journalists. Mr. Glass had recently begun to display an uncanny knack for discovering a weird little subculture—an evangelical group that worshiped George H.W. Bush, for instance—and then getting its denizens to cooperate with a story and spit out pitch-perfect quotes. Wow, I thought when someone at the party pointed him out to me, there he is: that 24-year-old who’s been churning out those great articles. I had a brief conversation with him and was surprised that he exuded no obvious charisma. He seems like such a sweet, shy guy, I thought. I wonder how he finds all those amazing stories.

Apparently, it was a desperate need for just this sort of admiration that led Mr. Glass to commit the journalistic crimes for which he eventually became infamous. Most of his amazing stories were, of course, partly or completely made up. There was no First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ, no Monica Lewinsky–inspired condom called the Monicondom. The young reporter brazenly made up people, quotes, and organizations, and he fabricated elaborate fact-checking materials to back up his other fabrications. In May 1998, Mr. Glass’s lies were exposed, his career imploded instantly, and media critics spent the next several months obsessing over the scandal’s ramifications for journalism in general and TNR in particular. Until a few weeks ago, when the New York Times reporter Jayson Blair’s career imploded even more spectacularly, Mr. Glass reigned as journalism's Great Fabricator. 

With The Fabulist, a mea culpa that’s heavy on the mea and light on the culpa, Mr. Glass has achieved an impressive reversal: While most of his journalism was fiction masquerading as fact, much or most of his novel is fact masquerading as fiction. The book’s protagonist and narrator is one Stephen Glass, a hot young reporter for a D.C.-based political magazine called The Washington Weekly. The novel’s Stephen Glass has built a journalism career by brazenly making up people, quotes, and organizations and fabricating elaborate fact-checking materials to back up his other fabrications. When he’s finally exposed to the world as the pathological liar he clearly is, he slinks away to his parents’ house in suburban Chicago. After a few weeks in hiding, he moves to suburban Virginia, lands a job in a video store, and begins putting his life back together again. He also tries to avoid lying. 

The Fabulist is notable partly because it disproves the throwaway line that circulated in the aftermath of the author’s undoing: Mr. Glass, the line went, was guilty of nothing more than choosing the wrong kind of writing career—he should have ended up at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, not The New Republic. As it turns out, Mr. Glass is not much of a novelist. He has little talent for crafting a narrative or for placing his characters in complicated, dramatically rich situations. His protagonist—a character the author based closely on himself, I think I can safely assume—is an emotionally immature neurotic who sweats a lot when he’s anxious (which he is, a lot) and veers off into tedious monologues about what he did and how sorry he is that he did it. 

Why did the fictional Stephen Glass do what he did? “What I truly wanted was to be well regarded by the people around me—actually, to be loved by them,” the narrator writes. That’s about as psychologically complex as this novel gets. The only part of the book with any real flair is a section toward the end about the narrator’s burgeoning relationship with a woman who is unaware of his past. 

It's impossible to judge The Fabulist solely on its merits as a novel, because the facts of Mr. Glass’s downfall are so well known and the impulse behind the book so nakedly political. After a passage describing the terrible nightmares he had after he was exposed, the narrator explains, “I recount my night terrors in part because journalists would later accuse me of not truly regretting what I had done, and not having suffered nearly enough for it.” A bit later, he writes, “Was I some kind of evil genius? Some journalists wrote articles suggesting as much, but it wasn't really that way. Just as I wasn’t really a wunderkind, I wasn’t a malevolent mastermind either.” The real-life Mr. Glass appears to be offering an apology for his actions—the fictional Stephen Glass apologizes many times for his actions—but he’s doing it in a fictional context, which undercuts the apology. The author is clearly trying to rehabilitate not only his own reputation but also, in a smaller way, the reputations of his parents, who were mentioned in some news accounts as potential causes of their son’s pathology. The parents of the fictional Stephen Glass are sweet and loving and normal. Several of the journalists in the book, on the other hand, are portrayed as either morally bankrupt mercenaries or pompous asses. 

For someone who became famous for his ability to imagine people and situations that never happened, and whose TNR stories can be read today as inadvertent parodies of slick magazine writing, Mr. Glass has written a surprisingly unimaginative novel. He could have had a lot of fun with his own story: His protagonist could have been a Republican operative, say, or a journalist blackmailed by a Republican operative, or a mole from a rival magazine, or a Mossad agent, or a heartsick man out to win the love of a fellow journalist. Had he used his own experiences as a jumping-off point, instead of as the outline for the entire book, he could have demonstrated his skill as a novelist instead of his skill for oblique apology. And then he could have saved his mea culpas for the talk shows.