Fakers

It’s not so much that there are more con arists and liars nowadays—after all, the snake-oil salesman is as old as snake oil itself. But never have there been so many elevated fakers: Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass grabbed headlines for making stuff up under the rubric of reporting, and James Frey invented a completely different life for his life’s story. And if we look at Borat or the Quebecois comedy duo who duped Sarah Palin into believing she was talking to French president Nicolas Sarkozy, it’s clear we enjoy a good hoax.

In his canvassing of counterfeiters, Maliszewski digs into both sides of the equation: Why do they do it, and why do we want to believe them so badly? He leaves few stones unturned, including those interred in his own backyard. In the opening chapter, “I, Faker,” Maliszewski tells of his time as a business reporter, working for a newspaper beholden to the very companies it covered. To exhale some of the frustration he felt over his hack writing assignments, he began inventing preposterous capitalists, taking the sides of companies that were clearly abusing their employees.

Fakers is packed with plenty of shaggy-dog stories about elaborate hoaxes—in 1999, a man named Joey Skaggs created a company called Final Curtain that promised to build cemeteries complete with restaurants and gift shops. Lesser writers could be tempted to coast on the sheer novelty of these stories. But Maliszewski has a curious mind and a sharp pen, so his book becomes a lot more. Of course, that’s assuming we can trust him.

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