Remembrance of things passed: how my friend Stephen Glass got away with it.

• Author: Chait, Jonathan
• Position: Book Review: THE FABULIST: A Novel - Book Review

THE FABULIST: A Novel by Stephen Glass Simon & Schuster, $24.00

ONE DAY IN JANUARY 1996, I SAT IN Steve Glass's apartment following the returns to the New Hampshire primary with him and one or two other colleagues of ours at The New Republic. We were watching a C-SPAN call-in show, and Glass began speculating about how callers can get on the air. Glass picked up the phone and called the number, and said he lived in Manchester. His status as an apparent bonafide New Hampshirite thrust him to the front of the line--within seconds he was talking to the host. His immediate success flustered him. Asked whom he had voted for, Glass stammered, "Uh, Lamar Alexander." Why? "I was, uh, concerned about Pat Buchanan's anti-Semitism," he explained. The host asked him what he did for a living. Glass replied, "I'm a worker."

His interview ended, and as he hung up the phone I doubled up in laughter. Real workers, I told Glass, would describe their job specifically--say, foreman at a tire plant. They don't refer to themselves as "workers." Only Marxists do that. Nor are they usually obsessed with anti-Semitism at the expense of all other issues. When I told all this to Glass, he could only blush and confess that he hadn't been able to think of anything else to say.

I remember very clearly what I concluded about this at the time: "Steve Glass is a terrible liar. If he ever tries to lie to me, I'll know it right away." In retrospect, this was not the correct lesson to draw.

In 1998, Glass made national headlines when he was exposed as a serial fabricator, and fired for concocting much of what he'd written. People who didn't work with him have often expressed amazement that he managed to convince a group of educated, highly skeptical colleagues to publish stories that, in hindsight, are wildly implausible. (The First Church of George Herbert Walker Bush?) If they suspected Glass from a distance, surely those of us who worked with him every day should have sniffed him out. This seems intuitively sound, but in fact has it backward: It was our very proximity to Glass that made us susceptible to his fraud. Everybody knew him as almost inhumanely industrious in his reporting--anytime you came into the office late at night, he'd be there--and equally diligent in his fact-checking of our stories. He was also unusually sensitive and considerate. Repeated exposure to him made possible the suspension of disbelief. My wife spoke extensively with Glass just once, when we...