The Writer Bitten by the Vampire Bug

Janet Malcolm, call your office. "True Story" is another "grotesquely magnified version" of a journalistic encounter, complete with prison visits, phone calls, long letters and a developing "friendship" between writer and subject. But it's more than that as well.

The difference between Finkel and McGinniss is that Finkel acknowledges the writer-subject dance from the beginning and tries to record its steps as he goes along. "I wanted to subtly show the reader my manipulations," he says. He even wrote a paragraph listing the manipulative elements in that first letter to Longo, though his editor convinced him that readers could see these without his help.

So what does Finkel think of the most famous passage in Malcolm's book, in which she writes that "every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse"?

"I think it's a brilliant line that I disagree with," he says. "My rebuttal is that you can be truly honest and still get the story."

Give him this: He's tried.

Bull Market

Its author got a $3,000 advance. Its initial print run was 5,000 copies. Its editor remembers smugly thinking it would sell 20,000.

He was off by only 310,000 copies. So far.

How did philosopher Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" turn into the year's most surprising bestseller? Originally published as a journal article in 1986, it circulated in philosophical circles for nearly two decades before it caught Princeton University Press Editor Ian Malcolm's eye. In book form, it is just 67 pages long.

Partly it was the novelty, Malcolm says, of a book with that title written by a "serious, eminent philosopher." Partly it was the "aha!" moment that comes when people take in Frankfurt's main point: The distinguishing characteristic of shoveling bull, as opposed to lying, is that the practitioner of the former doesn't care if what he's saying is true or not as long as it serves his purpose. Attention from the New York Times, "The Daily Show" and "Today" didn't hurt.

And then there are the book's attention-grabbing opening lines.

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this," Frankfurt writes. Read that and you may find yourself nodding vigorously and shelling out $9.95 just to feel better about the cultural manure pile we're all wading in. And maybe asking, at the same time: How did we get so deep in it?

Frankfurt is not a historian, so he can't really say. But he thinks it's a function of living in a democratic, marketing-oriented society.

"When you have to appeal to people as a source of power, you have to try to manipulate their opinions," he says, speaking from his Princeton home. Also, bull is less dangerous than the alternative: "If people get caught lying, then we have Senate investigations," but our response to bull is "to shrug and turn away in disgust."

What does the future hold for the 76-year-old Frankfurt? For one thing, his next book isn't going to the Princeton University Press. When a small-press author has this kind of success, the big guys sit up and take notice. The philosopher says he'll sign a contract with Knopf soon. Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards confirmed that the publisher would pay in the six figures for world rights.

This time, the topic is truth. No telling how that will sell.