A New Year's Resolution For The True-Crime Author

True crime? It is to laugh: David Samuels' The Runner is more a true-confessions kind of book. The New Press

 

by Sarah D. Bunting

A new year brings with it New Year's resolutions — to lose weight, to quit smoking, to cap the impractical-shoe budget once and for all. It's easy to make these resolutions, then break them as the second week (or hour) of January dawns.

It's even easier to suggest resolutions for other people, so I'd like to propose a New Year's resolution for David Samuels, the author of The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue, to wit:

"The next time I write a true-crime book, I resolve to write an actual true-crime book, not pad a con-man profile I already wrote for The New Yorker with indictments of Ivy League admissions policies and our haves-versus-have-nots society."

In fairness to Samuels, such indictments have their place. And the book is not bad or anything; it's quite well written.

But I don't read true crime for good writing, and neither does anyone else. (Fortunately, because it's in short supply). I read it because I want to learn about a given case. Ann Rule hasn't sold a bajillion books because she's such a fantastic wordsmith; her prose is mediocre at best. But she knows how to identify a juicy story, she knows how to get access to everyone involved with it, and she knows how to keep it moving.

What happens when you don't keep it moving, after the jump ...

Samuels had half the battle won, because James Hogue is a juicy story for sure; he's best known as the guy who impersonated a Princeton student in the early '90s, fooling the admissions office and his fellow students with unprovable assertions about dead parents and self-schooling — until the cops arrived on campus to arrest him during his sophomore year.

Hogue has a long history of property and identity theft that neither began nor ended at Princeton, and tends not to cooperate with writers and filmmakers wanting to tell his story. But Samuels put together a solid piece on Hogue for The New Yorker in September of 2001.

He should have just left the story at that. Alas, the full-length book romanticizes Hogue as a trickster who showed up the establishment, and casts Hogue's attempt to defraud Princeton as an admirable act, a long-overdue comeuppance for a hidebound, short-sighted institution.

Despite having attended both Princeton and Harvard himself, Samuels harbors an undisguised bitterness towards the Ivy League: "Accepting my ticket to an Ivy League college made me a willing participant in the greater fraud of a meritocracy in which some were ordained more equal than others."

I attended Princeton too, at the same time as Hogue, and my patience with Samuels's "Let me crap all over the Ivy League just in case somebody mistakes me for a Republican" attitude is limited. But that isn't the point.

The point is that I remember when Hogue got arrested. I remember half the campus wearing "Free James Hogue" T-shirts, I remember when he turned up at Harvard and got arrested again, this time for nicking gems from their geology lab, and I want to read about that.

Hogue didn't hoodwink Princeton's admissions department so that he could expose the Ancient Eight as a hotbed of nepotism and overbred privilege; he did it because that's what Hogue does. He hoodwinks. He defrauds.

He did it before, in Palo Alto, enrolling in high school with a false name. He did it again in Telluride, stealing everything that wasn't nailed down from friends and colleagues. He can't seem to help himself.

That is what makes him a good subject — not that Princeton's faculty and staff looked like idiots for admitting him. Princeton admitted Lyle Menendez, too; we've had to apologize for everyone from Brooke Shields to Bill Frist. So what?

Samuels is a good writer, but he didn't write the book he wanted to — namely, about the perversions of justice allegedly perpetrated by the Ivies — and he didn't write a true-crime book, either.

I learned nothing I hadn't already gleaned from the New Yorker piece or from Wikipedia; I got no insights into Hogue, his family, or other con men of this type.

Instead Samuels serves up a not entirely convincing thesis about the American dream, and how the "reinvention" therein is actually lying, along with a heaping side of resentment towards his own education.

And while that's his truth, it's not true crime.

Sarah D. Bunting reviews true-crime books, depressing documentaries, and more at TomatoNation.com.

2:24 PM ET | 01- 5-2009 | permalink

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