The ghost and the ghostwriter
A conman keeps his biographer at bay
Ghostwriting — what a thankless task: After countless hours of subsuming the self in another’s life story and personality, you get hardly any credit, not even a byline. But for Kif Kehlmann, the narrator of “First Person,” Richard Flanagan’s seventh novel, it’s a quick route to some cash. With an ancient car, falling-apart sneakers, and twins on the way, Kif is desperate, and a publisher’s offer of $10,000 to ghostwrite the autobiography of conman Siegfried Heidl comes just in time.
Heidl is a shifty figure who swindled Australian investors out of some $700 million. Unfortunately for Kif, Heidl is extremely unforthcoming about the basic facts of his past. Instead, he relies on a limited stock of repeated stories, like one about having to hand-raise a baby goat as part of his CIA training, only to shoot it in the stomach and watch it die.
With such meager material to work with and just six weeks to draft the memoir before Heidl goes on trial, Kif frantically starts imagining his subject’s life. In the process he can feel himself morphing into another person, aggressive and deceitful — as if he’s taking on the very con artist persona that he’s writing about.
Meanwhile, Heidl’s intrusive questions about Kif’s personal life make Kif uncomfortable. It’s as if author and subject are mutually insinuating themselves into each other’s existence. “The more I invented Heidl on the page, the more the page became Heidl and the more Heidl me,” Kif notes. But that unsettling setup suggests a weightier psychological tale than readers ever really get.
Mr. Flanagan has a rocky history with genre fiction. “The Unknown Terrorist” (2006), a contemporary thriller, was a sharp departure from the ornate historical comedy of “Gould’s Book of Fish” (2001) — which, oddly enough, is also about an Australian criminal. Likewise, “First Person,” coming after the exquisite World War II-set “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” which won the Booker Prize in 2014, seems a curious shift in focus.
Knowing that this novel is heavily autobiographical for Mr. Flanagan — he ghostwrote the autobiography of notorious Australian conman John Friedrich while he was a struggling young author and his wife was expecting twins — only adds to the head-scratching: Whatever did the author hope to gain by rendering this as fiction rather than a memoir?
There’s no shortage here of consciously profound lines about identity and self-creation (”A life isn’t an onion to be peeled …. It’s an invention that never ends”), but with no driving story to back them up the novel soon grows repetitive. Scenes in which Kif interviews Heidl and comes away disappointed are all too frequent, outweighing the more appealing interactions Kif has with his heavily pregnant wife, Suzy, and his best friend, Ray.
Kif’s bitterly comedic outlook does occasionally shine through, although sometimes in a way nonAussie readers might struggle to relate to, as when deriding “the Melbourne taxi smell of burnt plastic and stale Melbourne vomit.” Peter Carey’s “My Life as a Fake” (2003) also floundered when trying to spin the story of an Australian hoax into a more universal message about authenticity versus duplicity. Daniel Kehlmann’s “F” (2013) — could Kif’s last name be an homage? — managed to better couch similar themes in a satirical framework.
When it comes to identity, the novel argues, there are no facts, just masks and myths. That may be so, but it’s a scant foundation for a nearly 400-page work. As Kif says of writing Heidl’s memoir, “I may as well have used a pair of scissors to pick up spilled mercury.” The striking metaphor also applies, alas, to the frustrations of this particular reading experience.