A New West Book Review

True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, by Michael Finkel

By Allen M. Jones, 9-08-05

There’s a funny thing about saying, Trust me. Take it to the bank, cross my heart. That sort of thing. Nine times out of ten, it's going to come back to bite you in the ass. He doth protest too much, methinks. That sort of thing. You keep anticipating (with a healthy dose of schadenfreude) a stumble into inconsistency. And when the plea is frozen in print, when you have an opportunity to chew over this sentence or that, squint, ruminate, come back to it ever-so-slightly more jaded, the effect is multiplied. I wudn’t born yestuhday, bub.

The recent memoir and true crime account by former New York Times Magazine reporter Michael Finkel,* True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, is an exception. It wants, more than anything, to be believed. And indeed, start to finish, there’s nary a whiff of authorial deception or even the least hedging-of-bets. Quite the opposite. Given the author’s history (Finkel was fired from the Times for fabricating elements of a cover story), odds on you won’t find a more relentlessly fact-checked book new on the shelves this year, nor an authorial voice so preoccupied with giving readers the straight scoop. Here’s a story thematically concerned with lies and lying, with masks beneath masks, and yet the greatest efforts have been made to see that these themes don’t spill over into the writing itself. No matter how utterly compelling the story, regardless of how neatly the narrative fits into a formal structure of storytelling, it seems that here’s one you can trust.

Good thing, too. The coincidences in True Story, from its initial premise to final resolution, are all so tidy as to be the stuff of novels. Here’s the deal: About the time that Mike Finkel was being fired for certain massive errors in professional judgment (he cobbled together, from half a dozen different sources, the character of an African child, and then presented this fictional creation as an actual person), a man named Christian Longo was being arrested in Cancun for the murder of his wife and three children. Longo had been touring Mayan ruins, telling people that he was none other than the New York Times journalist Michael Finkel. (Meanwhile, the real Finkel was curled fetally on the floor of his home in Bozeman, Montana, wearing sweat pants and slippers, picking threads out of the carpet.) Less than two hours before the Times’ retraction was going public, Finkel received a call. It was a writer for The Oregonian. What did he think about the murders? Finkel’s reaction was predictable. What murders?

If you’re a journalist, especially if you’re a hot-potato freelancer seeking professional redemption, it’s hard to imagine a story being handed to you on a tidier plate. Even through the funk of failure, Finkel was sharp enough to recognize the opportunity, ambitious enough to take full advantage of it, and writer enough to extend the parallels provided by fate into his book. Not only was he going to be able to tell his own story, complete with appropriate mea culpa apologies, but he was going to be able to intersperse the account of his own literary misdeeds with those of a man accused of the most horrendous crimes imaginable. Furthermore, as it turns out, Longo was refusing to talk to any other journalists but Finkel. He now had an exclusive as well.

Initially, Finkel’s own life and career are given equal time with Longo’s. If nothing else, this particular biographical thread is a fascinating study in how a stellar career can be relentlessly pursued, effortfully erected, then oh-so-easily toppled. From Finkel’s first assignments in adventure writing to his long shot attempt at the big time (following along with a boatload of Haitian refugees) to his final hubris-triggered downfall, we’re given privileged access to an intellect forced toward honesty by its own revealed mistakes. Regarding the piece that stubbed his toe, Finkel writes,

“Everything flew together and created a whole. It formed a story – what felt, as I spun, like a beautiful, flawless story; a story with passion and sadness and joy; a story of one boy that explained everything I knew to be true and yet was still a simple tale of human desire...But of course the story wasn’t true. Each individual piece, yes, but the whole, not at all. And I wasn’t crazy. I could not plead insanity. The pressure, the time crunch, the competing story, my editor’s demands, the amphetamines, the sleeping pills, and the pot are merely excuses. I knew what I was doing...It was the stupidest thing I have ever done. It’s something that causes me pain every day, it’s something for which I will never fully forgive myself. I wrote the story and handed it in."

Gradually, however, Finkel’s memoir falls away and Longo’s crime comes to the fore. Through almost a thousand pages of handwritten letters and dozens of phone calls from Longo, Finkel gradually pieces together the circumstances that lead up to the murders. The description of the murders themselves, and the specifics of Longo’s guilt or innocence, Finkel avoids until the final pages. What emerges instead, courtesy of information provided by Longo as well as his friends and family members, is a portrait of a man who had a wife he loved, three beautiful children, a religious community that he valued, and who saw it all coming gradually unglued due to his own impossible hubris, the fragile net of lies and illusions that came to support his life. Here was an accretion of small deceptions gradually snowballing into needless tragedy. By the end, by the time his family was murdered, he was racking up debt using illicit credit cards in his father’s name, he was driving a stolen mini-van and avoiding arrest warrants and skipping out on parole. He was forging checks left and right. He’d also been lying to his wife so consistently about the state of their finances that she’d naturally assumed that things were more or less okay. Of course, their lives were a catastrophe, and according to Longo’s testimony, she had finally learned the truth only shortly before she was murdered.

The wandering threads of Longo’s narrative finally knot themselves together in an Oregon courtroom. It’s here that we, as readers, learn (or think we learn) the final details of how the murders took place. Finkel writes, “As I sat in the courtroom, with a pen in my hand and my notebook open on my lap...I was able to conjure only a single word. I scribbled it in my pad, in giant letters, in the center of the page. I circled it. I added an exclamation point. I wrote: BULLSHIT...He’d lied. I was sure of it. But it wasn’t so much the lie that repulsed me. I’d known, all along, that Longo was an able and willing liar. What shocked me was the nature of the lie. It was an ugly lie; an evil lie." A few lines later, he continues, “I was mortified that I’d affiliated myself with Longo – that I had actually cared about him, had wished for him the most humane possible punishment, away from death row."

I imagine it’s an epiphany almost any writer of true crime must face at some point. In order to write a compelling, complete piece, the criminal must be portrayed in three dimensions, he must be accorded some measure of sympathy. As a human being, however, meeting with someone who is capable of committing such atrocity, you’re repulsed. How do you reconcile the two? It’s this question that runs its subtle thread through every word of True Story. How is it possible for human beings to commit inhuman acts? And is redemption ever possible?

Michael Finkel, given his conspicuous misstep with the Times, has been mentioned and will be mentioned again in the same breath with Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, two other young, ambitious writers who twisted their ankles on disguised fictions. And yet, with True Story, Finkel has once again set himself apart. A memoir, sure; an account of true crime, you bet. But in its compelling narrative (after the first page, you simply can’t stop reading), its heartfelt attempts at self-exploration and honesty, its subtle exploration of larger questions, it leaves genre behind and steps up on the first rung of literature.





* In the interests of full disclosure, my own tiny little critic’s confession, it should be mentioned that I know Michael Finkel personally, having published his work during my years as a magazine editor.

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