Desire for fact lies in a million pieces

SOMETIMES, a nasty little literary scandal is an engaging minor-key diversion from the ills of the wider world. Sometimes, these controversies are -- like literature itself -- an invitation to understand that wider world a bit more deeply.

This week’s back-and-forth over bestselling author James Frey falls into the latter category.

If you’ve been too engrossed in the Samuel Alito confirmation hearings to take note of this affair, here’s the CliffsNotes version: Frey, an aspiring novelist and screenwriter, is the author of two memoirs -- “A Million Little Pieces” and its sequel, “My Friend Leonard” -- which purport to recount his addiction to alcohol, crack cocaine, acts of violence, criminality of other sorts, arrest, imprisonment, the deaths of various friends and associates, ultimately followed -- by what else -- rehabilitation and redemption.

Fueled by a ringing endorsement from television personality Oprah Winfrey’s celebrated book club, “A Million Little Pieces” has sold more than 3.5 million copies and currently sits atop the New York Times list of bestselling nonfiction paperbacks. Last year, only the latest installment in the Harry Potter series was purchased by more Americans. “My Friend Leonard” currently is a hardback bestseller. The problem is that, as it turns out, very little that is harrowing, moving or significant about the books is true.

Doubts about some of Frey’s more florid claims to chemically assisted degradation have been floating around for some time. Earlier this week, the online news site the Smoking Gun.com wrapped up a six-week investigation into the writer’s claims with a meticulously reported 13,000-word story alleging that all but the mildest handful of Frey’s claims to social deviance are fictional. He’s just another middle class kid from a good family, who had some trouble with drugs and alcohol, checked into a first-rate private rehab hospital -- Hazelden -- and now is clean and sober, assuming that part is true. Other news organizations, notably USA Today, also began backtracking through Frey’s past, and their reports appear to support the Smoking Gun’s charges.

Score one for online journalism.

For his part, Frey initially hired a lawyer to threaten the news site with a lawsuit, danced around a bit, collected statements of support from Winfrey and his publishers, Doubleday and Anchor, then did the now obligatory rhetorical perp walk through the Larry King show. There, he announced that he “stands by the book as being the essential truth of my life.” The only remarkable thing about his appearance was that Frey, a grown man, was accompanied by his mother. (Apparently, that wasn’t enough; now his publishers say future editions of the book will carry some type of author’s note).

The first thought that springs to mind is however depleted of its traditional virtues American society may become, we never will be short on chutzpah.

Formula for manipulation

There is, however, a deeper issue worth considering buried in all this pop-cultural titillation: Why are people so easily victimized by this sort of emotional con man? For some years, book publishing, television and -- more recently -- a growing segment of the news media have been sinking deeper and deeper into a particularly fetid sinkhole carved by two social currents that now dominate our collective lives.

One is narcissism, which has turned the confessional memoir into the dominant literary genre of our age. The other is the public’s prurient interest, which creates a readership for the literature of self-absorption and supports a metastasizing culture of celebrity. To borrow the therapeutic formulation, the one is the enabler of the other and, taken together, they are less a cultural trend or social condition than they are pathology. They are the root of the vulgar appetite for reality television. The new post-Katrina vogue for “emotional” television reporting you see spreading across the cable news spectrum is an opportunistic attempt to profit from this appetite, as is broadcast news’ insatiable obsession with missing blond women and fatal accidents.

At first blush, it seems somehow strange that so many people really don’t mind being duped if their appetite for the luridly personal is satisfied. This week, for example, the Internet was awash in expressions of support for Frey from readers who said it didn’t matter to them whether anything he said was true because they had been “helped” by his books. It’s a mysterious response until you recall what every good con man knows, which is that you can’t gull your mark unless they really want to be taken. There’s nothing new in that. Thousands of Bostonians went to their graves believing that Ponzi was the victim of official persecution.

There are engaging and well rehearsed literary discussions to be had over the factual liberties permitted by the memoir. As the Irish playwright Brian Friel once remarked, “An autobiographical fact may be a lie and no less true for all of that.” Or, as Kenneth Rexroth put it in a poetic context:

“History would be so much simpler if you could just write it

Without ever having to let it happen.”

Fiction and still subjective

Clearly, Frey would like to nudge the debate onto those grounds. There’s a problem, though. The claims he has made for his work are not merely literary. He, his publisher, Winfrey and many of the two volumes’ admirers also have argued for the books’ therapeutic influence.

Frey rejects the conception that addiction is an illness and attributes it to an irrational weakness in character -- sort of like a resistance to flossing. Similarly he objects to the 12-step AA-based methods of recovery, such as the one that sobered him up at Hazelden. In his book, he derisively describes a counselor’s attempt to suggest that his problems may have begun with an inadvertent childhood trauma.

“I just won’t let myself be a victim,” he wrote. And then, “People in here, people everywhere, they all want to take their own problems, usually created by themselves, and try to pass them off on someone or something else.... I’m a victim of nothing but myself, just as I believe that most people with this so-called disease aren’t victims of anything other than themselves.... “

Frey and his publishers have made a lot of money peddling these sentiments. If they were based on his actual analysis of his actual experience that would be one thing. But precisely what are they, if they are based -- as we now know they are -- on a lurid series of fictions. What sort of people appeal to a “higher” or “essential” literary truth in urging suffering individuals to disregard sound medical and psychological advice?

In a recent interview, Frey said that, “If it were my choice, [my books] would be listed as literature. It doesn’t really matter though. What matters is how many people read it and how it affects them.”

True enough, which makes him a dealer in the literary equivalent of laetrile.

The adjective that jumps immediately to mind is sleazy, though the right word probably is despicable.