This week’s Village Voice cover story on the questions surrounding Ishmael Beah‘s memoir reinforces a theme that’s taken shape in recent coverage of this story by American media. Unlike the original reporting in The Australian, which directly challenges the accuracy of Beah’s representation of his life as a child solider in Sierra Leone in A Long Way Gone, most of the stories from the American press have been focused on how Beah and his literary cohort have circled their wagons in an effort to shut the story down. (See Gabriel Sherman‘s Slate article on Beah two weeks ago for an excellent recap of the chronology.) As Graham Rayman tries to talk with Beah’s agent, Ira Silverberg, and Farrar Straus Giroux publicity directorJeff Seroy, he receives a cold reception—along with a stern talking-to—and he certainly isn’t going to be given access to Beah’s editor, Sarah Crichton, or the author himself.
(I ran into Silverberg last night, strictly by coincidence, and he had a simple explanation for why the search for the story has become the story: There is, he explained, no real story here, which leaves the press with nothing else to do but run around talking about how it’s trying to find a story that doesn’t exist. And while I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s the total truth of the situation, I’m not convinced he’s entirely wrong, either: There’s a distinction to be made between “this is 100% real” and “this is as real as I could make it,” and if one’s intentions are straightforward, there’s no shame in the latter, but that’s not the argument Beah chose to make, and as a result there are always going to be doubters.)
One of Beah’s strongest critics in the U.S. media, Janice Harayda, refers to FSG’s handling of the situation as a “wall of silence,” and in an email to me yesterday afternoon, she suggested comparing it to the openness of Riverhead executives like publicity director Marilyn Ducksworth and publisher Geoff Kloske with the press when Love and Consequences was definitively exposed as a fraud. “Clearly FSG now has at the very least a serious public relation problem. But that problem is largely self-made,” Harayda comments. “Of course, the Seltzer and Beah situations are very different. But what if FSG had… provided lots more disclosure right away? Clearly some articles on Beah have appeared that might never have been written if FSG had been more forthcoming all along. Is there a lesson in this for publishers hit by future scandals?”
Good question: What do you think?
(Personally, at the risk of sounding cynical, I think the threat of “a serious public relation problem” is more than a little overrated, especially when the worst-case scenario is a mild dressing down from Slate and the Voice. The opportunistic class-action lawsuit over A Million Little Pieces aside, readers rarely show sufficient motivation to censure publishers financially—when was the last time you heard of a successful boycott against a publisher? And even if FSG is alienating a few reporters and reviewers, which is open to debate, so what? Let’s be honest: They’re FSG; their most important books are going to get covered by the critical elite, such as it is, no matter what.)