The sting in the tail of new journalism

When Sebastian Junger met and greeted various press folk (including yours truly) at a lunch held at the beginning of the year by his publisher, W.W. Norton, it was plainly obvious that A DEATH IN BELMONT would be a very much talked-about book. No wonder, considering the cast of characters included Albert DeSalvo (jailed as the Boston Strangler) Bessie Goldberg (the titular victim) Roy Smith (her convicted killer, who may have been wrongfully imprisoned) and Junger himself, a baby when the crime took place. And with the book’s release today, the hype has hit some sort of saturation level what with profiles by the Boston Globe, USA Today, Time Magazine, the Observer, a first-serial excerpt in Vanity Fair, a one-hour special on tonight’s show of Anderson Cooper 360, and lots more — including an interview with his mother, Ellen Junger, in the Telegraph.

But the backlash began even before the book was out, precipitated by an article in Boston Magazine where Casey Sherman essentially accused Junger of playing fast and loose with the truth. Then the Globe and the New York Times interviewed Leah Schuerman, Goldberg’s daughter, who was infuriated with A DEATH IN BELMONT for being “inaccurate” and for suggesting that Roy Smith may not have killed her mother after all. Junger has come back with a statement of his own, saying “Leah Goldberg [Schuerman] suffered a terrible tragedy years ago, and my heart goes out to her. As a journalist, however, I am compelled to point out that my book is the product of three years of research and consultation with legal experts.”

One can’t help but wonder if this sort of reaction would have happened before the James Frey fallout, though the book that BELMONT’s been oft-compared to – Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD – certainly suffered from controversy at the time of its publication and thereafter. Never mind that Junger himself has been critical of Frey, which makes the backlash that much more surprising. But perhaps Alan Dershowitz, in his review last weekend in the NYTBR, made a good point that “nonfiction must be about actual truth, not about how coincidences could lead to a deeper truth.” And even though I thought Junger did a good job navigating the lines between absolute and relative truth, many readers may not — and the controversy will continue on for some time.

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