The talented Dan Mallory affair: is this high noon for the privileged white male? | Jonathan Freedland
The exposure of a novelist’s ‘dissembling’ could spell trouble for unreliable narrators everywhere
There’s a new work that has the publishing world gripped, with editors in London and New York confessing themselves hooked. It races along like a thriller, with several dizzying twists and turns and a compelling central character. What’s more, this sensational story is not fiction but a detailed, well-sourced work of journalism.
I’m referring to the profile of Dan Mallory, whose debut novel, , published under the pseudonym AJ Finn, has been a monster hit. The report makes an unsettling read, charting what the magazine calls the “trail of deceptions” left, including claims that he has endured and survived cancer in various forms – with tumours in both his brain and spine – that his parents were dead, and that his brother took his own life.
