Word: carcaterra
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When Lorenzo Carcaterra published Sleepers last year, he said his book--about brutal child abuse in a New York reform school in the 1960s and the long-delayed but satisfying revenge four of the victims gain on their tormentors--was a true and, indeed, autobiographical tale. His story, however, did not check out to the satisfaction of investigating journalists, who could find no hard evidence to support his claim. The author's defense was that he had changed names and details to protect his pals...
...ensued and obviously a sucker for a rattling good (if wildly improbable) yarn, writer-director Barry Levinson proceeded with his screen adaptation of the story. In doing what a filmmaker must do--strip a book to its narrative essence--he has perhaps resolved whatever controversy may still cling to Carcaterra's work. We now see clearly that the author's primary source wasn't life but movies...
...problem with Sleepers is not that the plot is inherently hard to believe; it's that Carcaterra's prose manages to make it seem preposterous. Here, for example, is a description of a football game between the guards and inmates at the correctional facility: "The two front lines banged at each other hard, blood, saliva and tiny pieces of flesh flying through the air." The watching crowd of upstate locals "sat stunned into eerie silence, stilled by the sight of a field filled with red-tinged grass. The spectators were left with little else to do but watch the drama...
That's pretty much the reaction provoked by a reading of Sleepers. Internal contradictions pile up. "We followed every pro sport with religious fervor and adolescent passion," Carcaterra writes on one page. On the next: "We cared little for Knicks basketball and barely tolerated Giants football." The author writes emotionally of a Greek hot-dog vendor he and his friends robbed: "We never saw the tiny, airless fourth-floor room he lived in, a 40-minute walk from his station, its only comfort a tattered collection of pictures from home, crudely taped to the wall nearest the worn mattress...
That is an awful lot of information about a room Carcaterra never saw. How did he obtain it? Well, the author says, details about the vendor were invented. "Is he Greek? Maybe. Is he Hispanic? Could be, whatever." No. "Whatever" won't do as the ruling principle of a book that purports to tell the truth...