True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa [Paperback]

This is not a book to read at the beach between Rum & Cokes. There is nothing frivilous or mundane in this read. I read it from cover-to-cover (all 300+ pages of it) and put it down only to make some soup, feed the cat, and run to the little girl's room. At 3:05 AM this morning (Memorial Day) I finished it and sat up another hour contemplating what I had read.

Mr. Finkel weaves his fall from grace at The New York Times into the narrative and it works perfectly. I remember seeing the Longo family murders in the press, but it was not huge news here in NYC. Only recently was I made aware of Mr. Finkel's book through a friend in the media who told me about it. I preordered it from amazon.com and it arrived last week along with 'Oh, The Glory Of It All!' which I read and reviewed.

This book will make you very angry on many different levels. However, in the end, no one can be blamed but the main character. Did he get married way too young? Yes. Can we put some of the blame on his religious beliefs? Not really. Was and is Mr. Longo incredibly selfish? Definitely. As Laci Peterson's mother said to Scott: There is divorce, you know. Why did you have to kill her?

This book is going to translate into a very interesting TV movie or film, and I hope someone takes it on. Because of the nature of the deaths of Mrs. Longo and their children, you have to wonder what their last moments were like and hope the children were too young to know what was about to happen to them.

Every one of us knows a Chris Longo. Over extended financially. Unable to say no to his materialistic urges. Knowing that you have rent to pay and you use that money for jet skis or a boat seems beyond the pale. Then you have the long suffering wife who just enables her husband to get deeper and deeper into the nightmare of the American Dream. She had to have known something. But like so many women I know, they go into denial on every level. And, of course, the outcome is disaster.

This is not your average murder mystery. Mr. Finkel does not bury you in statistics, gory details, and the everyday. His writing makes you feel like he's sitting at your kitchen table drinking coffee with you and sharing an incredible story. A story that, shockingly, happened to him! This is the beauty of the book. That in the midst of the worst time of his life professionally, when all seems lost, he receives a telephone call. A very important telephone call that changes his life and subsequently ours, as the reader.

I had not wanted to like this book because of the subject matter and because as a New Yorker I am quite familiar with Michael Finkel's story at The New York Times. He has completely won me over. I hope this book opens a door really wide to a new, creative and long career as an author again. I hope this is not his last murder mystery. I think this is his genre. I highly recommend this book. I am sure once you start it, you won't be able to put it down either. A great read.

I found this fascinating. I stayed up until two o'clock in the morning to finish it. It is a true crime story written in a clear, elegant style. Every sentence is polished, and every sentence is planned and placed in exactly the right place. There is no obvious striving for effect, no lurid prose, no fancy writing. Michael Finkel employs what George Orwell once called the invisible style. The writing is so unobtrusive, so deliberate in not calling attention to itself that what the reader experiences is the story itself, pure and simple.

Or stories. The book is like a film or a commercial novel in that there is a main plot and a subplot. The main plot is the story of Christian Longo who murdered his wife and three children and then ran to Mexico where he pretended to be Michael Finkel, ace reporter for the New York Times. This was a startling coincidence because Finkel had just been fired from the Times for falsifying a story about cocoa plantation "slaves" in West Africa. He was disgraced and fallen from the pinnacle of journalistic prestige. That is the subplot. Both stories are interwoven together in a masterful way. And the sequence of events is presented in a dramatic--not a strictly chronological--way so that the tension is maintained and the reader is led to eagerly turn the pages.

The overall story began when Finkel found out about Chris Longo impersonating him. Struck with the coincidence, he felt compelled to know more about Longo and why the accused murderer took on his name. He contacted Longo and worked hard to establish rapport and a friendship. His motive was to get as much information from Longo as he could in order to write a book. The book would fuse the story of his disgrace with that of a man who had murdered his family. The thread that ties the stories together is not just the initial coincidence but an obsession with honesty that haunted both men and the obvious lack of honesty that they both practiced. Both Finkel and Longo strove again and again to come completely clean about what they had done and what they were doing while using each other under the guise of friendship. Longo used Finkel as somebody to talk to (he had been isolated from the other prisoners and had almost no contact with anyone other than his lawyers) and as a sounding board for his defensive strategy. Finkel used Longo as a source for a story that would restart his career. As Finkel makes vivid, both men were more than a little desperate.

At one point Finkel gives part of the voluminous correspondence he had with Longo to three shrinks. They conclude that Longo has a narcissistic personality. He may indeed be narcissistic, but more to the point, Longo is a psychopath. He has all the classic features: a charming personality; a behavioral record of lies and thefts and murders; a grotesque sense of ultimately caring about nobody but himself; and finally an ability to be completely without remorse and able to party after his crimes, as he did in Mexico.

Ironically, I think it is Finkel who has at least a touch of the narcissistic personality. We can see this in his tendency toward an exaggerated sense of his own importance, first in imagining that the world would be all that interested in his story (ah, but he made the world interested by his skillful writing) and in this from page 267 (he's talking to Longo's lawyers who want ideas for Longo's defense): He writes, "I felt, at that moment, as though Longo's life was in my hands--that if I said the right thing, he'd be spared the death penalty." We can also see this in the tremendous amount of energy Finkel put into researching and writing this book. He desperately wanted to regain his reputation and to be regarded again as a top flight journalist.

Both men are caught in a moral confusion about lies and honesty, Longo because he's a psychopath who doesn't understand how people can be so upset about lying since it would seen to be the natural thing to do if it might benefit you (sociopaths learn at an early age that they are supposed to be remorseful about lying, and that it's bad, but they never really appreciate why, and so they are fascinated with the dynamics); Finkel because as he freely admits has told many lies in his life including the lies that ended his career at the New York Times. Neither has apparently thought much about Emerson's "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Neither seems to understand that it is not so much the absolute consistency of what you say as it is your motive for what you say and especially how what you say affects others. That is what counts. Most people know this. Furthermore everybody lies at one time or another, but not when bearing witness and not when the lives of other people might be adversely affected.

I think what fascinated Finkel about Longo was that he could see in him a caricature of himself; and as long as he could imagine that Longo might not be guilty or as long as he didn't look too closely at the murders, that was tolerable. However after sitting through the trial and hearing Longo's grotesque self-serving lies about the murders and the horrific details, Finkel had to psychologically distance himself from his would-be, partial alter-ego. And rightly so since there is something terribly unsettling about their symbiotic relationship.

But in the final analysis I say good for Michael Finkel. This is an outstanding work, a fine addition to a genre I like to call "participatory journalism." What Finkel learned about himself from this chancy venture is possibly as important as what this book has done for his career and for his self-esteem.

This is a compelling and disturbing book. Author Michael Finkel tells both his own story and that of Christian Longo, who was convicted of killing his wife and three children in Newport, Oregon in December 2001. Their lives became intertwined when Longo fled to Mexico following the killings. There, he adopted the identity of a journalist whose work he had read and admired: Michael Finkel. Then came a twist of fate no screenwriter could get away with. As Longo was being escorted back to the U.S. for trial following his arrest, the New York Times Magazine announced it was dropping the real Finkel as a regular contributor because he had created a composite character for one of his stories.

(Disclaimer: I have a strong personal interest in the Longo case. I covered the killings, his arrest and trial as a radio news reporter; my apartment is a two-minute walk from the condominium where the killings took place. As the trial unfolded, we in the press were aware that Longo was in regular contact with Finkel, though he had turned down all other requests for interviews.)

Finkel wrote a letter to Longo in jail, explaining that he wanted to know why he had assumed his identity. This led to weekly hour-long telephone conversations between the two men and a regular correspondence that stretched to more than a thousand pages on Longo's part. Although both men pledged complete honesty to each other, neither kept that vow. Finkel came to realize that each was using the other. Seeing some of his own worst qualities magnified in Longo, Finkel was looking for a form of personal and professional redemption. Longo, meanwhile, was using Finkel as a sounding board for the persona and story he would present to the jury.

In the beginning, Finkel went out of his way to give Longo the benefit of the doubt, despite strong evidence linking him to the killings. In the end, when Longo stood exposed for the despicable liar that he was, Finkel found himself unable to make sense of a supremely senseless act. If there's any frustration for the reader--at least this reader--it's the discovery that there are no answers in these pages to help make any better sense of this tragedy.

Longo may be beyond redemption, but Finkel is not. He's an obviously talented writer who has brought to life a tragic event in all its awful detail.-William C. Hall