Buzz Bissinger and me

Since starting the Literary Journalism course this semester,as part of my Honours, I seem to be drawn to stories written by American journalists. They dazzle me with their ability to make words leap off the page and grab the reader’s attention. Their breadth of writing is informative, engaging, personal and analytical. You can feel how each one of those words have been made to work hard just to get into a sentence – they are lean and dynamic; every anecdote is carefully measured; every ‘aside’ from a contributor (co-workers, friends, family) distilled and added like a pinch of salt to improve the texture.

Pulitzer-Prize-winning-journalists-working-for-world-renowned-American-magazines-and-newspapers. Cream of the crop. Top of the class. To me, that sassy, assured style of writing epitomises the strengths of American culture. Now, normally I’d consider ‘strengths of American culture’ to be an oxymoron, (Britney and Paris, aside) and I never imagined that reading several stories could sway my culturally imperialistic view but, I think I’m on the brink of a long, intimate, one-sided relationship with Stateside scribes!

Mark Kramer says, ‘literary journalists write mostly about routine events, not extraordinary ones…reading it feels companionable’. The writing style is frank, informal, human – providing perspective, irony and, indeed, judgement. Sticking one’s neck out, saying what one thinks or as Kramer describes literary journalism, as ‘the voice of someone naked, without bureaucratic shelter.’ I like that idea of pushing buttons, creating opinions, taking a stand.

I’ve just read the Sept. 1998 Vanity Fare article written by Buzz Bissinger called ‘Shattered Glass’. It’s the story of the most ‘sought-after young journalist’ in Washington, Stephen Glass and his spectacular fall from grace, after it was discovered he ‘made-up’ stories. It was easy to build a picture of Stephen through Bissinger’s prose and my own ‘brush’ with an (ex) friend who was totally charming, highly successful, well-liked, and incapable of tell the truth about anything, even if his life depended on it! Bissinger’s evocation of a taped conversation between Glass, Chuck Lane (Glass’ editor at The New Republic) and two others as being ‘chilling because of Glass’s psychological dexterity’ and the sheer totality of his lying: ‘Glass did what he did, what he had done for so long that maybe he no longer realised what he was doing – he lied some more’, had me nodding my head in complete understanding, as I recognised the mechanics of the habitual liar. Glass betrayed everyone, went to incredible lengths to cover his tracks (e.g., creating bogus websites for fictitious companies) and wrote stories that had only the slimmest grasp of veracity.

I found Bissinger’s story to be particularly engaging, as it seemed to ‘break’ some literary journalism rules. It constantly loops back to provide backstory, which is supposedly fine if it’s small pieces and provides the barest minimum detail, but Bissinger provides big chunks of backstory. They are so well crafted though it’s almost hypnotic: the reader lulled like a sleepy driver on a long, country road. I wouldn’t have even noticed how far I’d strayed from the story or how I arrived back into it, had I not deliberately re-visited paragraphs, ‘tracking’ the story framework and watching out for journalistic guideposts saying ‘beware, big fork in story ahead’. On my initial reading, I’d felt no jolt of ‘lost momentum’. Bissinger had tossed me backward and forward through time with wild abandon and nary a thought to the transgressions he’d committed. He is just that good.

The dismantling of ‘the white-hot star in Washington journalism’ was not only a story of a fabulist, but was written with characters (journalists) in the story who were just as interested in ‘getting to the bottom’ of this web of deceit, as Bissinger was in presenting the downward spiral of Stephen Glass. A double denouement – a journalist writing about journalism: presenting his research as an article, while in the story, he reveals the process of making stories and checking facts by the characters to ultimately expose the truth, about the falsehood, of Stephen Glass.

Bissinger also puts the crux of the story (well, it’s the crux to me) on page two of this eight page article: ‘He [Glass] is the perfect expression of his time and place: an era is cresting in Washington: it is a time when fact and fiction are blurred not only by writers eager to score but also presidents and their attorneys, spinmeisters and special prosecutors. From one perspective, Stephen Glass was a master parodist of his city’s shifting truths’. Just like that. Bang! No warning. Chuck out the road map, we’re heading cross-country. This ‘editorial’ is done as a small chunk – not backstory – it’s intended to momentarily jolt the reader. I’m sure this has broken another literary journalism rule, but I don’t have the wherewithal to know what!

After reading this article, I ‘googled’ Stephen Glass and Buzz Bissinger. Stephen is now working as a para-legal (how ironic is that?), while ‘Shattered Glass’ was later adapted for the 2003 film of the same name.

God Bless America!