Here are some recent thoughts about it, from an Esquire writer.
… American readers are more than happy to overlook a little literary fraud. Games of identity have always been a mainstay of literary experimentation, but in the past decade the games have turned sordidly mercenary. The JT LeRoy hoax, in which the author pretended to be a male “lot lizard” and confused a bunch of celebrities into being her friends, could have been a magnificent bit of modernist trickery, like the collected works of Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa was a Portuguese poet of the 1920s and ’30s who published as four different poets, all with different styles, reveling in the majestic possibilities of the unconstrained self. But the LeRoy hoax wasn’t about art in the end; it was about a little money and a little fame. James Frey still finds readers and publishers, even though he’s betrayed both. When Herman Rosenblat’s recent Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence, was exposed as a lie, interested parties found someone to publish the book as fiction rather than nonfiction. Our literary era has offered little in the way of insights into the workings of the human soul. It has provided, however, many great lessons in what you can get away with and still get paid.
To explain the recent explosion of cultural and financial frauds, it isn’t enough simply to blame the clever men and women who fool us and take our pride or money. Many Americans want to be fooled. This country is full of people who bought houses they couldn’t afford, who took out credit cards at 22 percent interest in order to pay off the interest on their other credit cards, who believed that the stock market would expand without limit.
… Cynicism is now a legitimate virtue…
Longtime readers know that despite this blog’s endless coverage of the American university’s biggest, deepest, and most tolerated frauds — big-time athletics, and the scholarship of medical school professors — UD does not consider cynicism a legitimate virtue.