The Runner

In 1989, teenage orphan Alexi Santana began his career as a Princeton undergrad and immediately established himself as one of the university’s premier long-distance runners, galloping beside Kenyan Olympians there to train.

Too bad Santana didn’t exist, because he was, by all reports, a hell of a guy. Santana was actually the 28-year-old James Hogue, a con man blessed with boyish good looks and a predisposition for prevarication. He charmed his way into elite social circles before finally being exposed as a fraud by someone from his past.

The only thing holding back this book is a radically fractured narrative. The halves are chronologically flipped, and even within the two sections, the author gets too discursive. Samuels told of Hogue’s Princeton hoax in a 2001 New Yorker article, which is reprinted and expanded in this book’s second half. But the first half, which recounts a latter-day Hogue holed up in the bucolic ski town of Telluride, Colorado, provides a much more fascinating story line. There, Hogue passed himself off as a jack-of-all-trades as he fleeced the wealthy who called Telluride home (sometimes for only a week out of the year). It doesn’t take much effort to parse Hogue’s motives at Princeton: He could rub elbows with the Ivy Club and join a society whose doors would gladly open for Santana but never for Hogue. But as a middle-age man lying and thieving with abandon, the pathology of Hogue’s fabulous fabulist nature becomes even more twisted. To his credit, Samuels takes an empathic approach to understanding why Hogue re-created himself so many times. He writes: “In my heart, I think of what happened to Jim as what could easily have happened to any smart, sensitive person who was more than a little unbalanced, which is to say that given the right circumstances, any one of us might wake up one morning severed from some essential and sustaining feeling of connection to the universe.”