What follows is something I wrote for the home base. It's not exactly a comprehensive look at the year in books, but it covers what was pretty clearly the major book-related issue of the year, the spate of author scandals.
The Peter Carey novel My Life as a Fake is a few years old, but it would have served as a fitting motto for the literary world in 2006.
Maybe it's still possible for a no-frills author to pierce the heart of the culture with nothing more than the strength of his or her writing, but all over the place this year was evidence that publishers themselves no longer believe this. The year's biggest controversies grew out of the desire to sell an author's persona along with their book, which is irritating enough when the persona has some basis in fact. When it doesn't, and people find out about the duplicity, you have at best an embarrassment on the Publisher's Weekly level, and at worst an Oprah-sized mess.
The year kicked off with The Smoking Gun disclosing that A Million Little Pieces author James Frey had greatly embellished his record of youthful mayhem, much of which took place (or didn't take place) just down the road in Granville. This wasn't just any dysfunctional memoir either: Oprah Winfrey had selected it as a rare nonfiction pick for her book club, citing Frey as an example of an inspiring comeback from addiction and a life of crime. After Winfrey first defended the author and then reversed field when an unusual amount of backlash hit, Frey became an example of something else: what it looks like when Oprah dips into her rarely used can of whoop-ass.
Also last winter came the revelation that JT LeRoy, the supposedly homeless transgendered ex-prostitute who attracted a cult following for books such as Sarah, was actually a pseudonym used by a 40ish ex-phone sex worker named Laura Albert. Rumors that LeRoy wasn't real had been rampant since he had emerged in the late 1990s, given his refusal to deal with anyone except over the phone. But the news was still something of an embarrassment for the numerous hip celebrities who had attested to his reality.
The tale of Kaavya Viswanathan was both sadder and more mundane. The Harvard student got the full media wunderkind treatment for her novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Publicity for the book focused on how amazing it was that Viswanathan was able to squeeze in the writing of a novel around the usual workload for a Harvard freshman. But she apparently dealt with her burden in the time honored school tradition: by copying off someone's paper. Numerous readers, including her fellow students at the Harvard newspaper, soon discovered dozens of similarities between plot points and language in Opal Mehta and other books centering on teenage girls, particularly those by Megan McCafferty.
The common thread to these controversies is that the perceived "authenticity" of the author was key to the marketing of the book. In Viswanthan's case, one could argue that the marketing existed before her book did, since the idea was to find a high-achieving, fairly pretty college student who could be packaged as the creator of wish fulfillment novels for smart teenage girls: Ivy League chick lit. JT LeRoy got more attention as an apparently unschooled “natural” talent just barely out of his teens than Arnold could ever receive as a 20-year veteran of San Francisco fringe culture. And Frey no doubt feared, as do we all, that his reality wasn't interesting enough to fit between the covers of a book, and that a novel about transgression and recovery would have no chance of standing out. So he invented an outlaw past for himself.
Of course, in film or music it would seem hopelessly old fashioned to complain about marketing interfering with the appreciation of True Art, which either means that books are a last outpost of standards in a debased world, or that books are just a generation behind the times, as usual. But any year in which Judith Regan loses a job can't be all bad.
Here's a reminder of the best books I wrote about in these pages in 2006, in alphabetical order:
At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68, Taylor Branch: In part 3 of this definitive biography, Branch returns us to the context in which Martin Luther King spent the final years of his life, and he reminds us that far from being worshiped in his own time, King was besieged on all sides: at odds with his old Johnson administration allies over Vietnam and scorned by a younger and more militant African-American generation.
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright: The New Yorker writer looks into the roots of Islamic fundamentalism and the eventual rise of Al-Qaeda, telling the story of how a prospective doctor from a scholarly Egyptian family and a rich Saudi teamed up to take on the United States, while a few in the federal government worked in vain to sound the alarm.</P>
The Night Gardener, George Pelecanos: The “crime” part of this supposed crime novel—the possible reappearance of a particularly gruesome serial killer of teenagers—is only part of the story here, as Pelecanos's examination of the underside of the nation's capital covers everything from office politics at the police station to the treatment of black teenage boys by the school system to the struggles of an ex-con balancing the need to stay straight with loyalty to family.
Strange Piece of Paradise, Terri Jentz: The biggest surprise of the year was this sprawling yet precise book, the author's recounting of the assault-by-ax that nearly killed her and a college friend 3 decades ago. Jentz is a screenwriter and not a journalist, but this is a great piece of reporting that has the power of the most personal memoirs.
