Review by New York Times Review
WITH ITS LURID TITLE and bloodstained cover, Walter Kirn's latest book is bound to be shelved in the crime section. But it's actually about class. A novelist, journalist and memoirist, Kirn is his generation's aspirational Midwesterner, a boy who goes East and sneaks into the magic circle of the American aristocracy. But no matter how close to the center he gets, he still feels like the little match girl, nose pressed against the window. In "Lost in the Meritocracy: The Under-education of an Overachiever," Kirn wrote about his knack for acing tests and sucking up to teachers and rich people in his native Minnesota, and how he parlayed it into a fairly successful college career at Princeton - until he had a nervous breakdown. This new book, about the killer con man Christian Gerhartsreiter, a.k.a. Clark Rockefeller, is in many ways a sequel to Kirn's college memoir. In this smart, real-life psychological thriller, the fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald, chronicling upper-crust America in free fall. "Blood Will Out" opens in 1998. Kirn, now in his mid-30s, has collected his marbles and has embarked on a serious writing career (albeit on Ritalin). He's living in Montana, twitchily awaiting the birth of his first child with his young wife - since this is Kirn, not just any young mom but the daughter of the literary lion Thomas McGuane and the actress Margot Kidder. Kirn is a success, but he has never lost his merit scholar's craving for affirmation. Naturally, that's how the man who calls himself Clark Rockefeller reels him in. Christian Gerhartsreiter arrived in America as a teenager, at a point when the country was veering away from hippie populism toward a renewed obsession with capital. Phony Beatlemania had bitten the dust. Now it was time to figure out how to get some money, how to make it grow and how to look as if you'd always had it. It was the 1980s, at the beginning of the Reagan era, and the nation was newly fascinated with the mystique of privilege. The culture bible for a certain kind of striver was Lisa Birnbach's in-joke "The Official Preppy Handbook." Kirn's narrative begins with an epic suck-up to a man he believes is a member of the 1 percent. Commencing a marathon drive to meet Rockefeller for the first time (a fool's errand involving an incapacitated shelter dog), Kirn spins through Montana, musing on the "pain-pill swaps, weeping fits and stray animal attacks of final-stage social collapse on the Great Plains." Kirn is excellent on the love-hate he feels for the Rockefeller types he met back at Princeton: "pedigreed, boastful, overschooled eccentrics who spoke like cousins of Katharine Hepburn.... I found them a bit repulsive physically, what with their prematurely thinning hair and delicate, intestinal pink skin." But these intestinal pink kids were also the kids who knew "the Vineyard" from "the Cape," who grew up cavorting on islands of mystery and wealth the way the children of provincial Americans like Kirn visited theme parks or a McDonald's. Although his first meeting with the man in New York is underwhelming, Kirn's instinct for obsequiousness around great wealth is undiminished. Rockefeller pays him only $500 for delivering the dog ("Shouldn't the figure have another zero?" Kirn asks himself as he gazes at the check), but he doesn't complain. He wants Rockefeller to owe him a lot more than that. Kirn's new friend entertains him at the Lotos Club in New York and gets museum guards at Dartmouth to open the doors for a private after-hours tour. He invites Kirn to his ramshackle mansion in New Hampshire, and Kirn believes him when he says the place was once owned by Judge Learned Hand. Kirn's insecurity around the American upper crust is crucial to Rockefeller's con. In Boston, he puts his young friend up at the starchy Athenaeum Club, which Kirn finds depressing but appropriate, since Rockefeller, as a pedigreed, ancestor-worshiping WASP, "loved such lamplit, varnished desiccation." When Kirn notices that Rockefeller lacks some of the trappings of wealth (no servants, dirty dwellings), he chalks it up to eccentricity. When Rockefeller lets his dogs lick supposedly genuine Pollocks and Rothkos, all doubt is banished: What could be more aristocratically eccentric than that? Rockefeller's cockamamie schemes (like bankrolling a version of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Canada) and queer obsessions with Chinese skulduggery are offset by the fact that he does sometimes seem to hold real jobs at investment firms. After Rockefeller is unmasked, Kirn concludes that "bankers seemed to have a weakness for monogrammed hustlers full of tea and toast." So, of course, does Kirn. Rockefeller's life fell apart in 2008 when he kidnapped his daughter during a custody fight. After he was arrested, his German family came forward to identify him and he was soon linked to a grisly murder in Southern California in the 1980s, committed when he was living under yet another alias. Kirn places that arrest in the context of the national malaise: Rockefeller is exposed as a fake at a time when "trust was crumbling everywhere," when the financial system is in danger of collapse. "Who were the Lehman brothers anyway? Letterhead fodder." Kirn the writer knew from his first interactions with Rockefeller that this strange man could be a fascinating subject. He didn't pursue that notion when he thought they were pals, but returned to it when Rockefeller became a national news story. Janet Malcolm has dissected the moral perils facing writers who get too close to killers (or, for that matter, to anyone they write about), winning their trust only to betray them later in books and articles. Kirn wrestles with a different aspect of the writer-killer relationship: self-doubt. He is tormented by his own failure, over more than a decade, to accurately read this man. "Writers exist to exploit such figures, not to save them," Kirn notes early on. "Our duty is to the page, not the person." But how should a writer deal with the limits of his own sensibility? Nonfiction writing by definition relies on cold facts. But writers are no better equipped than cops and prosecutors to know what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Kirn pondered all this at his former friend's murder trial, where he learned more than he could have imagined about Rockefeller's shape-shifting history. Although the murder horrifies him, you get the impression that Kirn is more upset about being gulled. "I wasn't a victim, I was a collaborator," he concludes. At one point, Kirn does call Rockefeller a "savage," but the bloody crime he's convicted of is, in the end, the part of the story about which we, and Kirn, care the least. The image of the trickster incubus invading his own imagination haunts the writer. In the end, his book isn't about the fake Rockefeller but about the mysteries of Kirn's - and by extension, our - response to him. "That Walter Kirn is one shrewd judge of character," he writes, ruefully adding: "This had never been said of me." The fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald. NINA BURLEIGH'S most recent book is "The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 9, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
In The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), Janet Malcolm dissected journalist-subject dynamics. Here Kirn also covers that subject, but in the highly personal story of his being hoodwinked, professionally and emotionally, by a man he knew as Clark Rockefeller, a member of of the famously wealthy industrial, political, and banking family. Over the years, their often long-distance friendship faltered in suspicious ways, yet Kirn kept up hope, naively perhaps, considering the flaws and untruths he uncovered, disturbing occurrences Kirn chose to ignore. But when Kirn woke one morning to discover that his friend Clark was not even Clark, much less a Rockefeller, and going to be tried for a murder committed years ago, he decided to finally write about their relationship, questioning along the way journalistic integrity and the encounters between the subject and the writer. This tale's a fascinating one (starting with Kirn's road trip with a paralyzed dog) that is covered elsewhere (Mark Seal's The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, 2011), but Kirn's reflecting, musing, and personal dealings add a killer punch to this true-crime memoir.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the summer of 1998, Kirn (Up In the Air) was a struggling writer, taking assignments where he could get them, when he accepted an odd task: transporting a crippled dog from a Montana animal shelter to New York City, where a wealthy benefactor from the Rockefeller family eagerly awaited its arrival. That alone could have made for a quirky riff on Steinbeck's classic Travels with Charley, but Kirn's road trip took another turn entirely as he entered a wild and murky 15-year friendship with the man who called himself "Clark Rockefeller"-a man who would eventually be the target of a nationwide FBI manhunt and charged with murder. Kirn artfully relates how the man born as Christian Gerhartstreiter manipulated those around him, operating against a backdrop of elite mens' clubs, expensive art, constant name-dropping, and tales of wealth and sophistication. The parallels with Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley are not lost on Kirn, who spends as much time trying to understand how he and others fell under Gerhartstreiter's spell as he does relating the primary tale of the criminal himself. Kirn's candor, ear for dialogue, and crisp prose make for a masterful true crime narrative that is impossible to put down. The book deserves to become a classic. Agent: Eric Simonoff, William Morris Entertainment. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
When someone hears of a con man who has fooled dozens of people over the years, the first question is: "How could they have been so taken in?" Journalist and novelist Kirn (Thumbsucker; Up in the Air) is in an excellent position to answer this question: for over 15 years he was friendly with "Clark Rockefeller," a supposed scion of the Rockefeller family, who turned out to be Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German immigrant who lived under different identities for over 20 years. Their acquaintance started with Kirn delivering a rescued dog to his new owner and continued through their respective divorces, until a parental kidnapping charge brought Gerhartsreiter's impressive run to an end. Even worse, a brutal and callous murder committed in the 1970s could be traced back to one of Gerhartsreiter's early identities. Kirn reflects on this odd friendship as he watches the murder trial and concludes that proximity to the rich blinds people to nagging inconsistencies. -Gerhartsreiter didn't need to fool him; he was already fooling himself. VERDICT This fascinating account from the perspective of a victim should appeal to readers of memoirs and true crime titles.-Deirdre Bray, Middletown P.L., OH (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The complicated, credulity-straining relationship between the author and his subject leaves the reader wondering about both of them. This is a book about two very strange characters. One is best known as Clark Rockefeller, "the most prodigious serial imposter in recent history," a convicted murderer, a kidnapper and a psychopath. The other is Kirn (My Mother's Bible: A Son Discovers Clues to God, 2013, etc.), a respected journalist and novelist who admits that he initially intended to exploit his relationship with his subject for a book but belatedly discovered that his subject had been exploiting him. "What a perfect mark I'd been," writes the author. "Rationalizing, justifying, imagining. I'd worked as hard at being conned by him as he had at conning me." The story begins, oddly enough, with the author agreeing to deliver a crippled dog from his home in Montana to the stranger with the famous surname in Manhattan. Why? He was having some financial troubles, and this unlikely scenario might result in a book. One would think that a writer with this much journalistic experience and accomplishment might do some basic background checking, yet he not only fell for the increasingly outlandish stories his source spun, he also decided to protect the relationship by refusing to write about it, even though, on first meeting, he found the purported Rockefeller "instantly annoying." The author also describes using Ritalin to meet deadlines and Ambien to catch a few hours of sleep, carrying a gun while on assignment, marrying a girl little more than half his age after a whirlwind courtship and basically establishing himself as an unreliable narrator of a nonfiction book. After initially defending his friend's identity against mounting evidence to the contrary, he decided to cash in: "He was conning me, but I was also conning him. The liar and murderer and heaven knows what else was correct about the writer: I betrayed him." A book that casts long-form narrative journalism in general, and Kirn's in particular, in an unflattering light.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
